


Grounded

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Listeneise [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 5 Things, 5+1 Things, Angst, Arthurian, Grimmauld Place, I'm so sorry, M/M, Music, Some Fluff, Too Many Fisher King Metaphors, but seriously lots of angst, just don't read the last one if you don't want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 18:04:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6867778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five records from Grimmauld Place 1995-1996, and one after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grounded

**Radiohead, _The Bends_**

Remus had gone to Canada to consult on something with as he said “old friends” but he had left with Sirius his three milk crates of records and a copy of a cassette catalog with which he had instructed Sirius to be very careful. “Don’t go ordering things to the house,” he said. “Have it shipped to Arthur or something and he’ll send it over.” Sirius recalled Arthur Weasley’s dismal taste in music from school (two words: Bee Gees) and immediately set about ordering cassettes to the house next door, as he had perfected summers when he was still at Hogwarts. Now he laid in wait for them on the steps of Number 12, Grimmauld Place, smoking the last of the pack of cigarettes Remus had left behind. He wondered if Arthur could be convinced to bring more cigarettes, as Sirius did not think he could bite his nails any shorter. 

He had ordered three cassettes which had been recommended that summer in letters from the kids. Namely he had purchased Nirvana’s _In Utero_ because Remus did not have the vinyl and Harry kept talking about it. He also bought Radiohead’s _The Bends_ and Huggy Bear’s _Her Jazz_. On the porch he wondered if no one understood how cruel this was. Probably Remus did but he couldn’t do anything about it. Actually likely if he really wanted to he could appeal to Dumbledore but Remus would never do a thing like that because of the swarming web of guilt in which he walked around ceaselessly. The deciding, ordering, purchasing, and waiting for the cassettes was the most fun or excitement Sirius had had since banishing a boggart (almost laughably predictably, in Dementor form) almost a week previously. In the interim he had tried to get rid of all the things in the house he suspected could kill Remus and/or Hermione with medium success (the remaining deathly trinkets would necessitate at least multiple wizards who had not been systematically drained of their magic sip by sip over twelve years, or perhaps even the efforts of a trained Dangerous Artifacts Response Team from the Ministry). He had researched alternative methods to get rid of the portrait of his mother and then had had to shut her up when he couldn’t find anything and threw the book he had been reading across the room, knocking over a set of ancient pewter dishes he didn’t dare to touch bare-handed. Kreacher had hidden upstairs in his bower after secreting away the more valuable and thus possibly more dangerous of the items but Sirius had not the energy to deal with him alone. Yet he also understood anyone else who would come to help would put their hand gently on his arm and say, Sirius, let’s leave the elf alone. They were always trying to pluralize things as such: how are we doing today, what are we up to today, let’s come in the kitchen, let’s leave the elf alone, let's leave that for later, let’s talk about that later, how about we stay inside, how about we stay inside, how about we stay inside — and once, unfairly at Molly, he had snapped, please stop saying we. Please stop unfocusing the fact of my aloneness. The fact of my second forcible relegation to aloneness. The fact of my second — third! — forcible relegation to a place with the capacity to slowly drain my fucking soul. 

He watched the Muggle postman come up the steps to Number 11, package in hand, knowing he himself was invisible from his exact position on the stoop. There was something of a rehearsal to the process and at first he had worried he would not remember. But in the motion and the act he had, which gave him hope for other things (sex in particular and also cooking, swimming, flying a broomstick or a motorbike, et cetera). The postman was young and greasy with a zitty Snape vibe. Sirius rubbed out the ember of his cigarette butt on the stoop between his feet. The mail was deposited in the box and the package on the steps. Then the postman headed back down the steps to his strange truck. 

Sirius stood which lately had felt like some sort of larval cicada unfolding. His bones cracked at the hips and knees. He cast an _Obfuscate_ — or rather, thought the spell with as much intent as he could muster, knowing likely it would have close to zero effect — and stepped out one tantalizing and delicious tempting step into the real air of Muggle London, reached and snatched the package, and slipped back inside. 

He had put all of Remus’s things in his own bedroom from his youth because it was the safest in the house. He had scrubbed the servants’ quarters clean for the kids and rid them of all their evil memorabilia and yet still he had been frightened to death to let Hermione in the house and as such walked perhaps too near to her for her liking whenever she was over. Yet Sirius knew his mother — in life and perhaps even now in death — would have prized Remus’s head above most of her other belongings. So Remus got his room, for which he had prepared by taking down most of the old photographs of the four of them though he thought this action probably ground down his teeth considerably. But now the three crates of records were in there and the suitcase of tapes magically expanded several times over, and Remus’s turntable he had had since they graduated Hogwarts, and his dinged-up walkman that he said was dented where he had dropped it on the ground in the Canadian Arctic at the end of the expedition he had done there when the whole team had had altogether too much celebratory firewhiskey mostly just for the warmth. “It’s held together mostly by magic,” he said sheepishly. “But you just put the tape in it and then you press play.” As though Sirius had forgotten how to listen to a cassette tape. But he reminded himself he had played a record for the first time in twelve years when he put on Pavement’s _Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain_ at Remus’s parents’ house in Castle Cary the summer previous. Perhaps it had been obvious he was out of practice because he had skipped the first track entirely. 

First he put on _The Bends_. He remembered, somehow, impossibly, the spell to make the headphones like speakers. More re-learning by doing, he thought. That brought his accomplishments up to ordering and playing records and and using the teakettle. Other places there was a big black hole. In Azkaban he had not remembered Remus’s name but come to think of it he had also not remembered James’s or Lily’s or even Peter’s. He had remembered Harry’s and also he had remembered the rat. The rat the rat the rat rat rat rat rat and it would beat like a strange drum in his head. At night he would sing it to himself when he could not sleep and he would watch at the moon in the window and try to think, what is it that I am supposed to be doing? But instead he remembered a line from a poem whose title he had forgotten: _we could manage cocktails out of ice and water_. 

He remembered when he was young he would lie on the floor in the shaft of dappled sun as it moved in the window and he would listen to music and move with the light until the sun went down. When he got really good he would set up a Quick-Quotes Quill to record his live response to the record he was listening to and these thoughts he would send to James or Remus or even Peter who said he liked all the music they did but mostly listened to Queen and yet didn’t believe that Freddy Mercury was gay. But these days he felt lying down like his heart would burst through his spine into the floor and also he could not turn his back to any darkness, and usually he even slept sitting up because he had in Azkaban and he had when he was on the run. So he leaned up against one of the posts of the bed and stretched his legs out and one by one lifted each foot to swivel the ankles. He also had done this in prison because dimly he had remembered he would not be able to escape and do what must be done if his muscles atrophied. If he had had parchment and/or remembered the spell for the Quick-Quotes Quill he might have taken notes for Remus who had left the address where he was staying in Canada magicked to the fridge: 

_Remus Lupin  
_ _c/o Natasha and Clio Harpy-Ross  
_ _28 Church Road  
_ _Sooke, Vancouver Island  
_ _British Columbia Canada_

Also with the accompanying note: 

_Please feel free to write to me but also it might be easier to stick your head in Floo at above address as you will have to finagle a Transatlantic or even Arctic owl for which you will have to ask Arthur to call in a favor from the Ministry and also they are NOT CHEAP! Even w hilarious “family member discount” for honorary Weasleys._

In what he later considered a pathetic display of desperation on his own part he had asked Remus if he and Natasha or Clio had something going on and Remus had told him they were married to each other which was apparently possible for two witches through a branch of Canadian wizarding law. He also said, “The last girl I had anything going on with was Eleanor Weinstein,” and they had both laughed, though Sirius only remembered who Weinstein was when Remus had reminded him she was the first in their year to have really developed curves, and even then he only remembered the Star of David necklace she would wear nestled just so in her cleavage. But later Sirius laid awake and thought about Remus sleeping with other men. He had known about Dearborn because James had walked in on them in an empty classroom and then reported it to Sirius in deep shock whilst chainsmoking. Sirius had felt something unfurling in his belly that was more like an octopus emerging from its underwater cave to devour some unsuspecting fish. He wondered how Remus explained all his scars to Dearborn especially given one of them — the Big One — could not really be explained as anything other than what it was. This would really be very much easier for Remus if he was with someone who understood him, Sirius had thought that night while he lay in bed staring at the ceiling. It really would just be really very much so much easier! But then it turned out about this he had been grievously wrong. 

Anyway this was the problem, because there was not a speck of marijuana in this fucking house, that instead of lying on the floor stoned just listening to music he was obliged to stare into space and think about other horrible bullshit while it played in the background. He rewound the record and started it again and studied the case. 

“Where do we go from here?” said the voice on the tape. “The words are coming out all weird — where are you now when I need you?” 

Don’t be an asshole, Sirius thought. They are all out there doing relatively important fucking things. He brought the soles of his feet together and stretched his legs in a diamond. His knees cracked, one after the other, like the shock of someone’s Apparition. Or like crackers on Christmas. 

“I wanna live — breathe — I wanna be part of the human race — ”

He fast-forwarded the tape enough to bring him to the next song and then he pressed play again. 

\--

He had not yet gotten to the point where he did not jolt like a livewire at the sound of someone in the door but this time it was Remus. He was very damp from having been rained on and Sirius’s mother’s portrait started screaming. 

“Hello,” said Remus. He cast a quick spell to dry himself off. Sirius reached out for his coat but Remus draped it over his own arm. Together they drew the curtains shut again over the portrait. Remus’s face was trapped somewhere between a laugh and a grimace. When they were done it seemed very quiet in the house. “If only she was that easy when she was alive,” Remus said. 

“She wasn’t quite so bad when she was alive,” Sirius reminded him. “Do you want a glass of wine or something.” 

Remus followed him down the hall. He was always scared partly shitless when Remus was even in the house. Like something horrible he had not caught would come rumbling out of the darkness with a wooden stake. Not that Remus had not survived worse. “How was Canada,” said Sirius. 

“Wet. It’s very beautiful. Massive fucking trees. It’s funny. I had only been to the very cold gray part before.” He smiled a little but with no teeth. “I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time.” 

“Well.” Sirius had also gone through the wine cabinets disposing of stuff he thought might actually be poison. Which left only about seven old and dusty reds, one of which he decanted into two smudged glasses. “Let me have a sip of this first why don’t you.” 

Remus’s mouth twisted but still he waited about two minutes after Sirius had had a drink to start in on his. “What tapes did you get.” 

“Radiohead and Nirvana and Huggy Bear.” 

“I suppose you ordered them next door.” 

“You suppose right. We can listen after dinner.” 

“Which is your favorite.” 

“The Radiohead one for certain.” 

Remus looked at him. Searching his face. It was funny the things he thought he should remember. This was like an itching at the back of his mind in the subliminal lizard brain or whatever. Remus looking at him across the table like there was something written on his face that would illuminate — come to think of it he couldn’t tell what. “I thought that would be — that doesn’t surprise me.” He took a seemingly overlong gulp of the wine and Sirius watched his throat. His lips were very red. “I mean I always liked the idea of the bends as a metaphor. Like you get sick from getting in too deep.” 

Sirius had not heard of the sickness before the record and when he read about it he wondered why people would want to dive so far to the floor of the ocean that they got bubbles of nitrogen in their blood. He had chalked it up simply to the fact that Muggles were fucking mystifying. 

“I suppose you’ve employed that before in your life.” 

“Once or twice maybe.” 

“You always were — ” 

Remus waited a minute before he said, “I was always what.” 

“I don’t know. Well-read. I always thought it was funny how you talked like you could make these stretches between words and feelings that I didn’t get, like in the slightest, even when I was — I mean as much of an adult as I — ” 

He stopped before he said, as much as I will ever be. Remus said “Well I was listening to a lot of Patti Smith.” 

“Don’t sell yourself short. You were also smoking like a ton of pot.” 

Remus smiled a little just enough Sirius could see a wine-stained flash of teeth in the buttery kitchen light. 

“Actually on that note maybe you can help me with something,” Sirius said. 

“What’s that.” 

“There’s a thing I have stuck in my head and I don’t know what it is.” 

“If it’s music from the seventies I hardly — ”

“I don’t think it’s a song. It’s, um, ‘we could manage cocktails out of ice and water.’” 

Remus looked into the dregs of his glass of wine like he was reading tea leaves and he circled the liquid around the glass so that it tracked legs and finally he set it quietly upon the table. “It’s Frank O’Hara,” he said. “It’s from _Animals_.” 

“Right.” 

Remus’s mouth was very tight and his eyes were very hard. This Sirius remembered was the look he got when he was trying to hold things in. Back in the day the sight of it had made Sirius want to smash ceramic against the counter. But it had been a very long time and perhaps Remus had almost grown out of the self-hating part of him that made him never want to say anything at all on various important subjects. Indeed finally he said, voice very soft, “Why do you think you remember that?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t remember the whole poem.” 

“Something about the day with an apple in its mouth.” 

“Right.” 

“Don’t do that,” Remus said, “you don’t have to pretend you remember anything when I tell it to you or like that you didn’t get put through a strainer like fucking — they separated all your curds from your whey.” 

Sirius laughed in spite of himself. “That’s another of — I missed how you talk. Your metaphors.” 

“You probably don’t remember I am not a great drunk,” Remus said; it was true, and Sirius did remember, at school after some juncture he would be leveling devastating unfiltered remarks and/or vomiting in the rubbish bin, or the sixth floor boys’ loo, or over the parapet of the astronomy tower, “and it’s only gotten way fucking worse.” 

“You’ve had one glass of wine.” 

“I didn't eat before I came here,” Remus said. “Do you ever find that you forget?” 

“I forget a lot.” 

“I mean to eat.” 

Rather the opposite, Sirius thought; he was hungry all the time, the hunger was a big black hole spreading in his stomach and his heart and his brain, but customarily he could not eat more than a few bites before he felt sick. In Azkaban they had been fed thrice daily a thin watery gruel of oats. “I think I can scrounge cheese and crackers,” he told Remus. 

“Don’t bother. Is there more wine?” 

There was. It was thick and dark as blood. He recalled in Azkaban when he had tattooed himself the blood would make him think of something he couldn’t name. A taste of thing. The moving slipping sainted ghost like a photograph of someone dead — the flash he would get of Remus’s face, his belly and his neck, his knees; he had not altogether known who this person was, but he could taste blood, and skin, Remus’s mouth, when he had been drinking whiskey, when he had bitten his lip, when he woke up, in bed in the Shrieking Shack where the mattress was exploding with feathers and the canopy had fallen ripped and gauzy, and he looked at Sirius and for one pure and bright screaming moment like a shaft of light through a window there was no recognition in the strange pale eyes. With it was a sheer mass of crushing guilt like — he had always thought of the scene in _Dr. Strangelove_ with Slim Pickens riding the bomb. Sirius had wondered why, and so he kept poking at himself hoping it would spur something more tangible, to no avail. 

“What are you thinking about,” said Remus from across the table. 

You, Sirius did not say. “Whatever am I usually thinking about.” 

Me, Remus did not say. Yet it was as clear to Sirius as though he had performed Leglimency. “Your shattered acid-trip years.” 

“Not much else to think about.” 

“I have something,” said Remus. “I need one more glass of wine.” 

He knew it was a bad idea but he had also started drinking on an empty stomach so he poured Remus the last of it and then he went and opened a new bottle. Remus drank his glass very quickly and Sirius watched his throat, his lips, the wedge of his collar in his shirt, the scar at his neck that was just visible. There it is, he thought — the huge unfocused yearning like a spiderweb. That feeling Remus had had surfacing in Sirius's gut like Madeleine Usher in the basement for nearly two fractured decades. “Let’s have it,” Sirius said, when Remus put the empty glass down silently on the table. 

“How could you have,” Remus said. He was looking not at Sirius but rather into one of the room’s many dark and dusty corners. “Honestly, how could you have thought it was me.” 

This he had been waiting for, a long time, and he had practiced it to the mirror. “I don’t know,” he said, the truth; “I was losing my mind, you know, it started coming loose even — I remember for a while I thought you were on heroin and sleeping with Greyback. Pete was — I guess he is smarter than we gave him credit for. Or his cowardice imbued him with a special conniving.” 

Remus had rested his elbow on the table and covered his eyes with his hand. 

“He planted all this — I was just waiting for someone to take you away because it couldn’t be. Everything got snatched out from under me like a rug or something but you didn’t and I was looking for — ”

“Yes,” said Remus, “that’s enough.” 

“You thought it was me for twelve years lest you forget.” 

“Yes,” Remus said again, carefully, “I was losing my mind. I was looking — everything came loose. We don’t have to talk about this anymore.” 

“Well now you’ve brought it up.” 

“I know. I’m sorry.” 

“I can’t stand to hear you say you’re sorry to me.” Perhaps he also was a little drunk. Remus dropped his hand from his eyes and it clapped upon the table. He was not quite crying but it was a near thing. “Don’t say that again to me ever about anything like even if you step on my foot or something I don’t want to hear you say it.” 

“I honestly am,” Remus said, “I’m s—”

“Don’t fucking do it Moony I swear to God.” 

“I should’ve — ”

“Stop fucking talking,” Sirius said. “I know how you get. I knew I’d done something bad to you.” He stood up and could have sworn Remus flinched. He looked very thin and ragged in his clothes like a foundling Sirius had drug in off the thunderstorm street. “I’m going to get you cheese and crackers.” 

“You shouldn’t be taking care of me,” Remus said, but his voice was very small. 

“Don’t tell me what I shouldn’t fucking do, alright, I can’t stand that either and I have to hear it every thirty seconds from everyone else.” There was a bit of blue and some camembert in the icebox and on the counter a stale crusty baguette. “Can you toast this bread?” 

“Just bring it here.” Watching Remus do magic he felt almost normal. It was a kind of stupid elemental joy. His brow furrowed just as it should and his hands moved delicately. It was like watching someone at a typewriter or a canvas. “You could just get the paper bag a little wet and put it in the broiler,” Remus said, when he was done. “I mean, next time.” 

“Put it in the what?”

“Never mind.” He ducked his head to hide he was smiling a little just in the corner of his mouth which was red from the wine and a little trembling. “I forgot you were raised in a cave by wolves.” 

“We’re in the cave,” Sirius said, “did you not realize.” 

Remus was just looking at him. Finally he said “You told me not to apologize.” 

“I just want someone really on my side not just — trying to pay whatever false dues. Who would do it because — something other than being sorry. That’s what I want or rather what I need I suppose. I’ve sort of heaped it on you.” 

“It’s alright,” Remus said. “I can — I’ll do that.” 

“Will you really.” 

“Yes.” He smiled. His eyelashes were wet just so and Sirius recalled what he would look like when he was young when he would cry laughing. “I promise,” Remus said. He reached across the table like for Sirius’s hand. But instead he ripped a chunk off the baguette and cut a staggering wedge of camembert. 

\--

**Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, _Admonishing the Bishops_**

Sometimes in Azkaban music had figured heavily in his dreaming and he would remember it when he woke up and it wound through everything like a dragging sucking riptide. Usually it was the song that went, I remember how the darkness doubled… because indeed at that time it was like all the darkness had folded in and in and in on itself until it was like even the light itself through the window was dark. All the day following he would sit and try to remember the next lyric and/or any of the other content of the dream but he could not. There was just the feeling of the guilt sitting on his chest like the nightmare in the famous painting. Sometimes he wondered how he could know for certain he was innocent because the guilt weighed so much. On the bad days — if they were close by in the hall — he only remembered the rat. The sight of it, at the last, slipping into the gutter. 

The other thing he would dream about was a series of tones he later realized via much research through Remus’s three crates of vinyl was from Brian Eno’s “Discreet Music.” Very pretty and very sad, as Remus had said about Pavement but also probably about himself and this whole stupid endeavor. He later thought maybe they had allowed him to have dreams as such to remind him of what he was missing, which was the thing itself and also the full memory of it, because he would remember things like, the cords of Remus’s neck or his underarms, which were sometimes almost hollow and the hair was soft and he smelled like rain and dust. Remus’s hips and his backgammon set of ribs and his rounded ruined knees. Remus’s voice very soft and shattering and hoarse with sleep. All of this but the name of this person was guilt. The name and the taste and the words from the soft pale mouth of this person was guilt and when he woke up he heard only the nightmare heartbeat wash of the sea and the guilt ringing ringing ringing and he did not know exactly what he had done. He would hit his head back against the wall and pick whatever scabs on his hands and watch at the door. 

He did not have much of a libido as he sometimes felt it had been separated from him in Azkaban — curds and whey, as Remus had said — and then when he was on the run it had been a waste of energy. Because all he was doing now was languishing in a horrifically nostalgia-drenched hellzone he had tried once or twice to masturbate in the shower to little result so he had fearfully given up. He sat in bed listening to records thinking of any number of Hemingway protagonists tortured by their impotence. After all it seemed he had such shit else to do perhaps his single remaining purpose was to be Remus's kept man, but then it didn't seem Remus would have him and anyway he couldn’t much get it up. He stared at the wall and wondered. Snatched filaments — Remus’s mouth at his ear. He tried to fantasize about other people but couldn’t remember other people. 

When he woke in the morning stillness on the couch in the parlor where he had fallen asleep with an old spellbook he remembered first the song that had been playing in the dream, which was “Hurricane” by Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. “Somehow your hurricane envelops me in misty rain…” Remus had the 7” _Admonishing the Bishops_ and Sirius rather preferred the second song, “Undertaker,” but “Hurricane” had been the song in the dream. It sounded like mist in the hills and valleys or like the wall of fog at the sea. There was this piece toward the middle where the guitar sounded fragile and also like a ship’s horn. He ached with something he could not name through to his very soul and the slim pale slant of light through the window slid wetly across the threadbare rug and the stacks of books in which he had sought solutions to his own boredom (fun potions, baking projects, occult mysteries; leave it to the Blacks to have none of the three) and finally the fireplace, which was ash-black and vacant having been swept out in search of occult tokens to destroy upon the Order’s initial arrival. 

He stretched his back and tried to reach into the dream again but there was nothing there but the music. “Funny how your quiet heart can carry me like a rushing river…” He was humming to himself and finally he yawned and stood. Thus he realized at least part of the aching in his very soul etc. was in fact his erection. 

\--

He had swum ashore in Northumberland not far from Lindisfarne. The coast there was protected and not much habited and the lights the dog’s mind had followed in the night were thin and scant. He had swum nearly eight hours but could not rest and so he walked onward and inland though the dawn, in the forest ever toward the parkland. The dog grabbed some rough clothing from a line in the Cheviots but still it was three days before he dared attempt his human form again. When he did the sight of his own body shocked him. The very thinness and the tangled black ink marks like bruises upon fruit or mushrooms. His hands which were pale and skeletal but for the scarred radial lines he had carved in to delineate something he had forgotten. The looseness of his skin and the wildness of his hair and beard. In Azkaban it had been cut upon occasion with a knife. 

First he remembered James whose name and face had been lost to him for over a decade. James in the hills behind Hogwarts shredding marijuana flower between his fingers onto his glossy Quidditch weekly and then deftly rolling a joint without looking at it; he had cocked his head, he was listening at the wind. Then he remembered Lily, and then Remus. In full strange breathless reality Remus listening to Wire’s _154_ at 6am in their flat and the way Remus watched him when he came in the door like had been starved for something his whole life and couldn’t ask for it. Much the way he had always looked at Sirius at dawn in the Shrieking Shack. Then he recalled the face and the name of the man who was the rat. 

He had never grieved for any of them because he had never had time. He vomited thrice despite having had nothing in his stomach for days and he wept and wept and could not stop weeping. Things came back; it was like a flood after a summer without rain, it was like having been lobotomized and then restored by miracle, it was like some caveman trepanning of demons — of the big black suffocating weight hauled off him bodily. Like a false skin. He reasoned it must have been what Remus felt like when he turned human after the full moon. It took him another day to so much as stand up again. 

\--

Days would drag like something almost dead. Like a Horcrux soul. Sometimes his mind would skip; he would listen to records and move in the sun on the floor and then without his realizing the playout groove would be skipping hums and outside it would be dark and he would have to remember to take a breath. 

So he did not really know how long it had been before Remus came in the door looking altogether more ragged even than usual and carrying a Muggle backpacker’s water bottle full of some horrific brown liquid condensing inside the plastic. He walked so slowly and tenderly and closed the door with such gentleness that it did not even wake the portrait of Sirius’s mother who usually could hear a pin drop or perhaps sense Remus’s aura. 

“Hello,” he said very softly to Sirius in the kitchen. He sat heavily at the table and passed his hands through his hair. “Can I borrow your basement tonight?” 

“You still need a basement with that potion?” 

“I’ll disturb your mother if I do it like in the drawing room.” 

“Of course it’s fine,” said Sirius. He brought a cup of chamomile tea in the Blacks’ safest mug to the table for Remus and sat across from him. He smelled wild and like burned light and he had missed a spot shaving and cut another and he had the bright and searching dissociating eyes he got on when he was either tripping on acid or drawn up just so by the moon’s red tide. “Don’t you have to drink that stuff sooner than later.” 

“Don’t fucking remind me,” said Remus tiredly, but he uncapped the bottle and looked in it. His mouth twisted. 

“Pretend it’s like, a fine moscatel.” 

“Not possible. It tastes like death. It tastes and looks and feels like death.” 

“What’s in it?” 

“I don’t know. I talked to Clio a little about the theory in Sooke. Actually it’s very scientific.” 

“Like how so?” 

“Let me tell you tomorrow or something.” 

Carefully he took his coat off like his bones were rubbing each other the wrong way. He had cuffed his blue Oxford shirt up to the elbow to hide the holes there he had patched badly with mismatched plaids. Sirius watched him press the heels of his hands into his eyes and the meat and grist and scars of his forearms and the ink stain in the soft inside of his wrist and the delicate uncanny cast of freckles like a spatter of blood or stars. His shoulders spreading in on each other and pushing up his collar inside his shirt and the very old wound at his neck like he had tried to rip his voice out, which was from second year at Hogwarts. “Fuck,” he said. He leaned his forehead into the palm of his hand. His lips were very chapped and red from having been worried at. “This part is like the second-worst now.” 

“The waiting part?” 

“Yes. I should really drink this.” 

“You want a chaser? I think there’s Fernet.” 

“Oh my God,” said Remus, “fine, yes, let’s have some Fernet.” 

Sirius poured it out in two fine square highball glasses he suspected were among his parents most prized antiques. Remus inspected his before he drank — each one had the Slytherin crest carved vividly toward the thick and heavy green base. Then he made a face and shut his eyes and drank the contents of the water bottle. 

Together they toasted with the Fernet when Remus finished and then Sirius watched him hold his hand tightly over his mouth with his eyes screwed shut to keep himself from vomiting. “It’s like,” he tried to say, but then he had to seal his hand over his mouth for a minute again. “It feels like all my veins are burning like liquid metal or something. But then it passes so. I guess it’s better than waking up stuck to the carpet with blood.” 

He did this nearly two hundred times without you, Sirius reminded himself. Do not ask him, do not ask him because he will tell you if he wants you there and if he doesn’t then it will not be. 

“Was it worse when — after I was gone?” 

“Oh,” Remus said. He had started in on the chamomile tea. “At first it was horrible. The first time I didn’t wake up for four days. Then it got almost like it had been. Then this potion was invented but that was only a couple of years ago.” 

“Where were you?” 

“Texas. So I tried it, it was fine. Actually at first it tasted even worse. I had a student — did I tell you? She was a little teenage girl werewolf. She wanted to try it but I said she couldn’t until I did and she didn’t speak to me for a week. But I mean it was in — it hadn’t been approved or at all regulated.” 

Remus had lived so much but it was like he had tasted none of it. Like he had walked through it all in a trance or a daze. Like he had watched it all happening like a movie or like something outside his window. Sometimes it was very difficult for Sirius to be other than resentful. 

“Still you took it, though.” 

“Of course I did,” Remus said, “I’ve been past — I was past caring, like if I died.” 

“I swear to God were you not about to rip open by the skin I would eviscerate you for that one.” 

“Excuse me if I’ve had no one to call me out on my morbidity for thirteen years,” said Remus. That thing that was not a smile and not even almost but was something hinting at almost was in a corner of his mouth. 

This was another thing to be upset with Dumbledore over, Sirius thought. That no one had been dispatched to see that Remus ate and abstained from overly grim remarks and refrained from taking experimental potions. 

“I knew it would work,” said Remus. “Don’t worry about me.” 

Sirius recalled the Slint song, “Kent,” which he had been listening to upstairs in what he thought he remembered to have been early morning. _Don't worry about me. I’ve got a bed. I’ve got a Christmas tree inside my head._ How can I not, he wanted to tell Remus. 

\--

After a little while Sirius showed him to the door into the cellar. This too he had rid of most of its frightening artifacts wishfully foreseeing an occasion like this one. “There’s — you can leave your clothes on the step. Want me to bring a glass of water for the morning? Oh and I think I have tincture of — ” 

“You aren’t coming down with me?” 

He sounded more tired even than he had twenty minutes previous and his dragging of his left knee was more pronounced and there was a little more yellow in his eyes like the foliage inside him was turning autumn. But in his voice was a very human yearning. 

“Yes well, I didn’t think — ”

“Come down. You don’t even have to put the dog on if you don’t want to.” 

It gave him chills to think it could be that way now. He opened the door and said _lumos_ and Remus descended before him down the rickety stairs, leaning heavily on the railing. It was wet and the ceiling dripped and in the chests and trunks stacked along the walls were a few things rattling symphonically at the sound of human voices. “What’s in there,” Remus asked weakly. 

“I haven’t checked. Probably boggarts or maybe worse. I can’t get the locking charms on them to open up.” 

“I can try tomorrow,” Remus said. Gingerly he undid his Oxford shirt (more smudged ink tracing all the way down his forearm to his elbow) and he folded it very neatly and it was only when he was lifting the ratty torn hem of his t-shirt that Sirius realized he should probably stop staring and take his own clothes off, if only to be fair. “Your tattoos,” Remus said. 

Sirius waited for more but that was it. Remus was leaning against the wall with his knees drawn to his chest. He looked very thin but Sirius didn’t think he should say anything about it. In the shadow the strange birdcage of his ribs bore vivid definition. “Wasn’t much else to do.” 

“What are they all.” 

“Most of them don’t mean much.” The things he had remembered in Azkaban enough to mark on himself were scattered and strange. Ancient runes for protection and security and memory. The series that had been carven on the crypt at Dinas Bran, which meant, roughly, _there is a vault here which should not be opened_. He could hardly have remembered all the runes for his fifth year class at Hogwarts so after his elopement from Azkaban he had chalked it up to the subconscious hivemind execution of spiritus mundi way deep and ancient in his brainstem. Like before anything else he knew he remembered because of his blood how to perform magic in symbols. He had marked the runes along places it seemed important remain undisturbed — across the big blue vein inside each wrist and thigh, and along the rib beneath his heartbeat. “There’s this, though,” he told Remus. On his thigh where he could reach easily in big block letters he had practically carved RAT, and on the opposite 31.10.1981. The skin was ridged and scarred with years upon years of reinforcement. Remus just looked at it then up at his face again and said nothing but he had lifted an eyebrow which — Sirius remembered this — was often the best he could respond to anything at this particular juncture. “And there’s — this one is nicer.” Inside his arm he had done a chart of the moon’s phases. To get the right circular shape he had traced a button that he had chewed off his uniform. “I told you I would look at it out the window and wonder what I was supposed to be doing.” 

Remus’s mouth moved with no sound but the shape of it was, yes. 

On his ankle he had done a piece of the line from the Frank O’Hara poem — _ice+water._ Elsewhere _how the darkness doubled._ And elsewhere a big swollen and abstract black mess of lines delineating all the time he had spent trying to remember Remus’s name. 

“How much longer do you have?” he asked Remus. 

He held up a hand tremblingly showing five fingers. 

Sirius crouched beside him in the floor and pressed his hand over Remus’s knee and held it there. Long ago he would rub Remus’s back and shoulders and then for a while hold his hand and kiss his face. Press his nose against Remus’s neck and Remus would tangle a hand in his hair and they would breathe together. 

“It took me months,” he said, watching Remus try very hard to focus; when he managed Sirius felt pinned in a shadowbox like a butterfly. “To transfigure, like this very old rusty nail into a needle.” 

He would sit against the wall and run over it with his fingers trying to remember the spell and filing into the tiny metal piece every scrap of intention he could muster until eventually it was sharp enough to break his skin. 

Ink, Remus mouthed. 

“More months,” Sirius said. “Well at first and then it got easier. Transfigured from blood.” 

Loosely Remus grasped the forearm with the moonchart then he let go again. 

Love you, Sirius thought, desperately, fucking desperately. He sat cross-legged on the cold stone and together they waited until eventually Remus made a sound in the back of his throat like a kicked dog. Then a tiny wilting cry of pain that turned on the end of it into an animal’s yelp. Sirius’s heart was hammering in his ribcage and he felt far back the thrumming self-preservation instinct but he had learned in his years on the run to pay no heed to it because often it just got you into worse trouble. He watched — he had watched this before but never with human eyes and yet this also he had remembered, on a long seething endless loop, on the days when they stood outside his door. Remus’s spine pushing at itself until it turned inside out. It was like a reverse birth but there was no blood. Or at least, none that was yet visible. Under the delicate skin bones shifted and shifted until Sirius could see them no more under the handsome russet coat. The face shoved out and the hands and feet curled and sharpened. Then the animal shook itself as though it had come in out of the rain. It looked at Sirius for one breathless and uncertain moment in which he did not think his heart beat at all and then it sat back on its haunches and licked his face. 

“Oh, fuck,” Sirius said; he was crying. “Holy fuck, Remus.” 

The pale eyes searched his face with a smart concern. He was this close to collapsing to the floor to sob like a child. So he put the dog on. The dog who was like, Moony Moony Moony Moony Moony singing in its blood. A fine joyous silver ribbon like its own memory restored. For a while they playfought and snapped at one another and squared around the basement until Sirius rattled one of the trunks and the thing inside started screaming. They howled at it until upstairs the portrait started howling and then they howled some more. 

\--

He woke when Remus came back to being like watching a sped-up evolution film in a Muggle Natural History museum. His pelt turned inside out and his spine curled up and then straightened again and the bones shifted and he elongated… Sirius lay and watched him breathe thrice in his human body (ribs expanding) before he went to Remus’s side and touched his shoulder and said “Moony?” 

“Here,” Remus hardly said. There was very much less blood than there had been the last time he had done this (June or July 1981) but he could see Remus’s hurt in his eyes. He had always been better at this than at crystal balls. “Not so bad, right?” 

He still thought he would weep if he thought about it overmuch so he put his pants on and got Remus into his sweater like a child and helped him up the stairs. His knees cracked and his lips were so tight they were bloodless and there was sweat in his hair curling at the back of his neck and at his temples where it had gone finally a pure soft grey. It was past dawn and the light cut in just so through the grimy kitchen windows that Remus pressed his eyes into Sirius’s shoulder. 

Upstairs again to Sirius’s old bedroom they went very slowly step by step upon the stairs in silence but for their breathing. In the bed there Remus lay down like an old man. Sirius had always thought of the Fisher King in the grail legends he had been told as a child by the only nursemaid the Blacks had ever employed who gave any credence to Muggle fairytales; for that infraction among others she had been quickly fired. 

“I have a sleeping draught in the other room I think,” Sirius told him, keeping his voice quiet. “I had Hermione send me some things from Hogsmeade.” 

“Have you got any pot.” 

“No. I wish.” 

“It’s fine,” Remus said. Gingerly he curled onto his side. “Want to put a record on?” 

“Alright. Which one?” 

He yawned. “Um. _Admonishing the Bishops_.” 

What hellish coincidence was this, Sirius thought, pulling the vinyl from the sleeve and putting it on. His fingers were trembling on the needle. From the bed behind him he heard Remus softly humming. Somehow your hurricane envelops me in misty rain… 

He went to the bed and sat beside Remus in the loose comma in which he lay with just his face and shoulder bare beneath the heavy red-golden blankets. Remus reached for his hand and traced the bones. The crooked radial lines he had tattooed there like a starmap or like the hands of a clock. Like the vibration of pulsars. Like the sun moving on the floor. Like rain tracing the stone. 

I always knew it was you in there, Sirius wanted to tell him; I always knew it was you and you never believed me. Instead he leaned down carefully and kissed Remus’s jaw, and then his cheekbone and then his mouth, which was open, which was full of breath and warm, and Remus’s clammy hand wrapped the back of his neck. When he pulled away to breathe Remus pressed up, chasing him, and he thought, what have I done to this man? With what was decidedly not entirely guilt, for the first time in thirteen years. 

\-- 

**Leonard Cohen, _Songs of Leonard Cohen_**

At dinner they had been looking at each other across the table quietly amid the hubbub of conversation and when they went upstairs afterwards Sirius followed Remus into his old bedroom and shut the door. Downstairs he heard the front door closing in Minerva’s wake. He watched the stripe of skin at Remus’s belly pale and fine as butter when Remus lifted his sweater carefully over his head.

“You’re very thin,” Sirius told him, having meant to for a while. 

Remus had leaned up on the edge of the bed and undone the top buttons on his Oxford shirt enough to show a neat wedge of his collarbone and the hollow of his neck. There was a tiny birthmark there, Sirius remembered, just beneath his second button and just off center, the color of darkest chocolate. 

“So are you,” Remus said. 

Sirius took a step closer. This is happening, he thought, which he decidedly had not the first time it had happened, in the alleyway behind the Six Arms perhaps a decade and a half previous. At dinner he had watched Remus across the table — at his collar delicately folded, at his neck inside his shirt. At the inch of wrist where he had pushed up the sleeve. The omnipresent ink stain — the freckles and birthmarks and the old wounds. His soft eyes. His nicotine and ash. His lower lip, which Sirius had been kissing very carefully on the couch in the parlor before their guests arrived. He’d managed to get his hand on Remus’s thigh when he heard the visitors upon the doorstep and he felt rather like he was sixteen years old necking on the common room couch though of course back in those days he had been doing it with one of the Prewetts and also with Mary MacDonald and briefly with Dorcas before she had realized (bolt of clarity, utterly McKinnon’s fault) that she was a lesbian. 

Remus’s mouth was still very warm and he tasted like the glass of wine he had had while he picked at the roast chicken and stuffing and asparagus that Molly had brought with her in several floating tureens from the Burrow. His hand was at Sirius’s shoulder questing ever toward the back of his neck and as such Sirius was emboldened enough to slip his own hand under Remus’s shirt, press his thumb tightly in the pocket of soft skin at the ridge of his hipbone to feel the heartbeat in the thick blue vein. To trace blindly the familiar topography of scars and the ridges he thought perhaps he had remembered even when he had not remembered anything. He undid the Oxford shirt button by button feeling how soft the fabric was with age and how one of the buttons was shattered in half and sharp at the broken edges and beneath it the fine ridge of Remus’s breastbone — spreading ribs containing lungs containing breath — beneath his knuckles. 

Remus was altogether not so difficult to get naked and Sirius remembered this. It was not so much that he was chaste as that he was prudent, as he himself had explained stonedly to all four of them when he was about sixteen, to a quotient of raucous laughter. He also said he did not kiss and tell though they later realized he had probably said this mostly because he did not want to tell them right out he was queer. Sirius had sniffed it out inasmuch as he was realizing he himself was the same but clearly none of the rest of them had as Peter still believed Freddy Mercury was straight and James was blind to everything happening in front of his face except for Lily Evans’ legs. But of course this was the thing that kept happening where he would be trying to do something real and live in this new and strange world and the old one would come rear its ugly head again. Like there was no backing out of it no matter how much he tried and on account of how sick his memory had become he would always have one foot in it whether he liked it or not. 

Remus broke their kiss to tug Sirius’s shirt over his head. This too was familiar except this Remus was thirty-five, and he was altogether too skinny and he had new scars and more gray in his hair. The hands were the same — the ink and the rough quill calluses and the rare investigative surety which sometimes felt like something he saved for sex, and specifically for Sirius — and the soft pale mouth which was wickeder than one would suspect, and the left eyebrow which would react even when Remus was trying very hard not to react at all. How he pushed back on his elbows into the unmade bed with his knees up and just apart and reached for Sirius with just his eyes. “Cover me,” he had once asked Sirius; he did not remember the occasion; it was just after somebody had died. After that Sirius had always done it without being asked. 

Other things he had not remembered and as such he was obliged now to remap them after the long forgetting years. This birthmark and that; this scar and that. The way his left nipple was cut through and how he would jolt through his whole body like lightning had struck him when Sirius so much as looked at it. How he shifted and arched in the small of his back such that the shelf of his ribs pressed up and out of his hollow belly. The skin there was stretched over with scars that had grown with him from his childhood and those that had not and his artful spattering of birthmarks and the blaze markings like an old forgotten trail left there slick and shining where Sirius’s mouth had already passed over made him look like an ancient map to someplace forever lost, or like an artwork created by a zealous madman. He had always been thin enough that the ridged case of bones was distinct enough to bite at the base of it. Remus’s sigh he could feel beneath his lips. The taste of his skin like shortbread, or like vellum paper. This he thought perhaps he remembered, or it was like a dream he wasn’t sure when he’d had. Remus’s fingers circled the shell of his ear and the nape of his neck. The nails were short and broken and ragged. Days they used to spend fucking and dozing and getting stoned listening to _Here Come the Warm Jets_ then they would go out nights to stalk Death Eaters and Sirius would stare at the spreading red bruise inside Remus’s collar. He would think about the whole endeavor in dizzy flashes — Remus in his bed, red velvet blankets, healing wounds Sirius would drag his fingertips just over, licking him open, and how he tasted, and the sound of his breath when he was trying not to make another kind of sound — and they way they fucked mornings after someone had died. The way they fucked when whispers started abounding one way or the other. The way they fucked the last time or the time before or the time before that. 

Remus shoved himself up on his elbows again. His hand was against the crotch of Sirius’s underwear through his unzipped pants tight and firm with the heel of it gently moving. When they kissed their teeth clashed and the sound of it echoed in Sirius’s skull so deliciously unpleasant as to feel cauterizing. “I want you,” Remus said when he pulled away. Almost tentatively his hand at Sirius’s crotch tightened. “I want — this. Inside me.” His knee brushed Sirius’s side. There was a wide-open spreading vulnerable thing in his eyes but his voice sounded almost like it had when he had said, shall we kill him together… “If you want,” he said after a heartbeatless flagging second, “If you — ”

Unsaid, if you can. 

“I do want to, God, badly, it’s just you know it may last either three seconds, or like two hours.” 

“It’s fine,” Remus said, shifting under him, “it’s fine. Whatever you can give me. I need you.” 

It was like some second heartbeat thrum how Remus needed him. Stay here, he was telling his own mind. Stay here stay here stay here do not do not do not even attempt to summon the silvery Pensieve strain of the last time. Of any previous instance but for this one. Concentrate and focus. This is after all your once and always-lover in this new-old body which is almost your own. 

They made short work of one another’s pants and then by some miracle Sirius remembered the spell and by further miracle could still cast it without a wand. At the feeling of it Remus bit his lip such that he tasted blood, vivid and metallic as deja vu. “A long time,” Remus said when Sirius pulled away. 

“Thirteen years?” 

Remus’s smile was a little bitter. It was cruel-ish just so. He said, “Not so much.” 

Sirius’s jealousy was like a neon red Hogwarts Express barreling down the track at full throttle. Remus pushed up as though to flip them and Sirius pressed him back down with a hand at his lower belly. They had always playfought like this almost the way they did as animals. Now he could feel the heartbeat inside Remus’s hip without trying. It was like hearing just the percussion of a familiar song. 

He was rougher with his fingers than perhaps he should have been and he worried for a moment about his bitten nails but Remus pressed toward him, shifted; after a moment he let one of his knees fall open onto the bed. His eyelids fluttered delicately against his flushed cheek like he was dreaming. It was like praying to a preferred saint in a cathedral’s side chapel watching at the mural of their martyrdom, Sirius thought. He watched Remus take a fistful of sheets and tighten it. 

“How were they,” he asked. Remus opened his eyes a tempting and delirious halfway. “Your other lovers.” 

“Oh.” It trailed off just so. “They were all — Sirius, they were alright; they all looked like you.” 

His heart jolted; he curled his fingers, vengefully, and Remus yelped, whether in pleasure or pain Sirius did not know, did not care. 

“It was all, I don't know, it was all sex, you’re like, I feel like an insect and you're a kid with a magnifying glass.” The small of his back was in the barest most fragile arch. “Sometimes I would wonder — how you could have sold us out with all the, all the things you would do to me…” 

“Jesus,” Sirius said, “Remus — ”

“Then I figured — you must have been one hell of an actor, right? You must’ve been really — fucking committed.” 

He realized the conceit of it all far too late and by the time he realized what was happening Remus already had him on his back, straddling him at the hips, and none too gently he took Sirius’s cock in one sweaty hand. That strange bitter smile was on his face again. With his tongue pressed at the corner of his mouth he lifted up higher onto his knees and Sirius yearned for him. His heart was wild, wild, wild. “Remus,” he said again, hopelessly, desperately. 

“I know,” Remus said, “God, I know. I know…” 

He took Sirius’s cock inside himself faster than could be comfortable and when he sat deeply he rocked with his hands braced against Sirius's chest until he found the angle that he needed. All Sirius could do was breathe very deeply to keep from coming within the forecasted three seconds and cage his fingers against-inside the long rungs of Remus’s ribs, against his hips and belly, feel him shift and stretch, the delicate trembling rising tectonically out of his bones, wobbling like quicksilver. 

“Your hands,” Remus said. His voice was bright and wild on the naked razor edge of something.

“They’re just — just hands.” 

Remus wove their fingers together. Against all his pale butter skin Sirius’s hands with their calluses and tattoos looked very dark and crude and rough. He pressed the thumbs into the soft place beneath and between the ribcage feeling the sharp tab of bone, the wings that fanned outward, the rapid symphonic beating of the heart. 

“Fuck,” he could feel Remus say. Whatever avian wingbeat locked up in his chest wild with its trappedness and Sirius held it in. “Not just — ” 

He pressed himself back again and his swallowed cry was like a faraway bird’s. Sirius arched up into him and his thin eyelids fluttered, his back bowed and his neck like a supplicant; Sirius could feel the bones shifting beneath his skin and the very patient kite-string tightness of the muscle trembling… the soft red mouth was just open. 

I love you so much, he did not say; when I wondered who you were I loved you. Heaven knows why. 

“I still,” said Remus as if he had read Sirius’s mind. His eyes wide and wild and searching Sirius’s eyes as though something there was truly legible which perhaps for him something was. “I always. When I thought — I always.” 

“I know — Remus, I know.” 

“Do you really.” 

“Yes, yes — when I thought — yes.” 

At the small of his spine the tremor spread. Remus’s hand had cupped his jaw and their kiss was wet, messy, burning, the molten thing at the center of the earth shoving ever impossibly toward the surface… Roaring roaring roaring like the sea reaching up at him and Remus’s mouth slipped along his jaw and the raw ragged breath pressed against his neck. His hand ranged up — Remus’s back, the topographic map, the complete world. Sirius had spent so long pulling apart even from himself, divorcing and dismantling and degrading and fraying, like a puzzle or a sweater, like a ghostship or a ruin, and it was not so much like being put back together as it was like feeling all his scattered pieces strewn around with another’s so tangled they couldn’t ever be put back right —

When he came he felt with the heady delirious lightning rush Remus’s sharp gasp in cold wash on his skin. The infinitesimal desperate tightening of his body to keep Sirius inside; his delicate wince when Sirius slipped free regardless. He wanted nothing more than to throw Remus over on his back and bury his head between his legs but he could hardly even summon the energy to take hold of Remus’s cock — blood-hot and smooth as velvet — and to stroke him with his favored languid twist (Remus had shown him — 1979. It had rained in the afternoon but it was dusk and there were ambulances in the street and he had spread Remus out in his bed and held him down by the shoulder and watched) and to listen with careful attention like to some John Cage piece as that wheezy pinch in Remus’s breath tightened and tightened until at the last it unravelled along with his brow and his whole self. 

\--

He had remembered, because it was bad enough for them to let him keep: on the day of his sentencing he had known already what would be done. He had been kept in the basement of a shop on Diagon Alley bound with magic and chains alike within wards Dumbledore himself had constructed to contain him and just as an added precaution they had kept him not fully conscious with a spell or perhaps even with drugs, which explained his dismal performance in his own defense (they claimed they had not had time to secure legal counsel) at his travesty of a trial. When he could order his thoughts enough he was thinking, I’ve killed them all. Every last one, I’ve done it, except the one I meant to. 

Dumbledore came to Apparate with him to the courthouse. Already they had snapped his wand in two places as was ritual custom. “Where’s Remus,” Sirius asked him. 

“He’s at — he’s safe. He yet lives.” 

“I want to talk to him,” Sirius said. As he recalled it was the one thing he had asked for. He had not even asked for a glass of water though his mouth was so dry it was difficult to speak. “I want to — even I could just write him a letter.” 

“You will never speak to him again in your life,” said Dumbledore with that strange stern lightness he had always employed when Sirius and James had done stupid things that were rather less apocalyptic. “He may very well end his own life in — ” He shifted his gilded sleeve to look at his moonwatch. “Eleven days’ time.” 

He had said something. He’d forgotten what it was. Perhaps it was just a scream. His unintentional body count was compiling rapidly. Dumbledore had had to drag him to his feet and even when upright he could hardly stand. At the trial they had asked him when he had turned coat and he had laughed. Come to think of it he had done a lot of laughing since his apprehension. How else did one respond to pure and relentless horrible absurdity? He had been running on pure mania for days and it felt rather like a dismal coke trip. In the final conscious dregs of his mind he was thinking perhaps feigning madness would get him a lifetime ticket to the criminal insanity ward at St. Mungo’s instead of Azkaban. It was not so difficult considering the potency of whatever they were using to keep him complacent. But to think of it from a political and symbolic perspective, they had not found Voldemort’s corpse, and the Ministry needed to do something with the body they had. Nevermind it was living. The jury, which was composed of Ministry workers alone, had decided as to the fact of his guilt in a five minute session. Then the guards accompanied as ever by Dumbledore had shackled him again and drug him from his seat back to the basement. 

Not for another three days would he be escorted to the company of the creatures whose very purpose upon this earth was to drag the molten memories of your hugest mistakes back into the forefront of your brain and run them on repeat like Super 8 tape in a Muggle porn theater, but still his mind was doing it by itself. Running running running running. The house, and the child. Scorched earth. Two corpses. When he lifted the baby and how the baby stopped screaming when Sirius rubbed his back. The single red wound upon the forehead deep but unbleeding. The grand wide-open bellyache hollowness at the heart of the world. He went outside into the night which smelled of woodsmoke. A first trembling ghost of snow. The cold scorched in his lungs. He thought of Peter and figured now he thought he had the will for _Crucio_ and perhaps even for the other one both of which he had tried before (both against his cousin) to no avail. She had laughed. Once he had thought he had had the will to try _Crucio_ on Remus but figured pain would not sway a werewolf one way or the other. But it did not matter now because — 

Then it started from the beginning again. The house. The child screaming and his raw strange wound. The two unmarked lovely corpses, the burnt drapery. It ran through over and over and over again and after long enough it would go to the next piece — the worse, he had always thought — in a kind of twisted mockery of orgasm. The realization like some elemental consummation. The cup filling up and spilling over. It was not Remus. But because they had all thought it was they had told nobody when they changed Secret Keepers. They had not even told Dumbledore. 

He had decided he would set out with the child and kill Peter and then see what happened from there. After all that seemed at the time most pressing and likely he was going to Azkaban for life anyway which at the time he thought perhaps he would not really mind because it would probably be better than facing Remus after all that had happened. But then Hagrid arrived, and from there everything went thoroughly belly-up. 

\--

“Dinas Bran,” said Remus. He had sat up cross-legged and piled half the duvet in his lap and from his pants on the floor he had found his cigarettes. With the free hand, which was very warm, he traced the ridged line of runes at Sirius’s heartbeat. 

“You remember from school.” 

“Yes. I’m surprised you did.” 

In fifth year, while he took the Ancient Runes class in which they had covered the Arthurian mythos, there had been a very brief interlude in which Sirius was obliged to actually study as neither Remus nor James would speak to him. This did not seem like the time to remind Remus of this.

“I always thought it was very eloquent,” Remus continued. “They thought about how to make it translatable. What they could possibly say to us that would work to keep us out.” 

“I didn’t remember all of the various and sundry curses.” 

“Biblical list of plagues. Um, magical castration et cetera.” 

“Has anyone attempted to get in?” 

“In eighty six there was some talk about it. I was in Dharmsala. One of the magical research reviews was soliciting papers. But then, Chernobyl.” 

“What does that have to do with anything.” 

“It became more trendy in wizarding academia to discuss what we all can do to — stem the tide, as it were. What good is the grail I suppose if it is so easy — so inevitable to make more waste lands.” 

“Depressing.” 

“Yes,” said Remus, “it was all very depressing. The whole decade was depressing. Like I said you hardly missed much except those Talking Heads LPs.” 

“And you,” said Sirius. Your skin, your holy languishing. The sound — the pitchy theremin bone-sound of Remus’s breath, his ribs expanding, when Sirius did something very right. “Your hair going like sixty percent more grey. And this one — ” He reached and traced two fingers up the longest strangest oldest scar he didn’t remember, high inside Remus’s shoulder and across his breastbone. 

Remus grasped his hand and knit their fingers. “That was — eighty-three, eighty-four.” 

“Ten years.” 

“Yes. In Budapest.” 

“What were you doing there.” 

“Suffering.” Remus smiled. “Dropping acid. Fucking.” 

“Fucking, eh?” 

“I wrote this very psychedelic academic paper which was my first publication but I suppose you don’t want to hear about that.” 

“Perhaps later.” 

“You should rest assured that you remain the best lover I’ve ever had. Honestly in the days when I could have _Avada Kedavra_ ’d you without a second thought I’d resigned myself to the notion that no one would ever make me feel like that again.” 

“Feel like what.” 

“Like walking on the edge of a cliff. Or like a — like one concentration of feeling like a supernova — I’m not a poet, Sirius.” 

“That was very sweet.” He pressed his palm as tight as he could against Remus’s palm. He was forgetting the last time he had seen Remus smile with his whole face up from his soft bow lips bitten red and a flash of his teeth and the crinkle in the corner of his eyes. “That sounded like — I don’t know. Like Brautigan or something.” 

“What’s that Brautigan bit about sobbing high-geared fucking,” said Remus. He pulled their hands apart so he could trace the lines in Sirius’s palm. “I guess you’ve been reading all my beat nonsense.” 

“Not nonsense. It’s just I can’t believe how much acid you dropped without me.” 

“Not that much and anyway I liked Brautigan even before I ever dropped acid.” 

“Not before you started smoking pot.” 

“That — I guess I will concede that. I had a particular taste before those days.” 

“I remember you had that one Leonard Cohen record you kept in your trunk — ” 

Remus smiling like that was — he looked like he was twenty years old again, or even seventeen. “How in hell do you remember that.” 

“Well it wasn’t really a good memory was it. The first time we listened.” 

It was early in first year and they had bothered Remus about his single vinyl record and in fact they had each played one of their records from home in order to entice Remus to put it on. Sirius had played _Led Zeppelin IV_ and James had _Abbey Road_ which they had all heard before anyway so they argued about it for its full runtime and Peter had rather impressively chosen Dylan’s _John Wesley Harding_. Finally Remus put on _Songs of Leonard Cohen_ and his tiny pale hand was shaking a little on the needle and when he had started “Suzanne” he sat cross-legged on the floor and looked at his hands in his lap and his face was bright red especially when Leonard Cohen sang “you know that she will trust you for you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind…” They had been obliged to turn it off in the middle of the fourth song because Peter had run to the loo they later learned to weep over the continued gutting wound that was his perpetually absent father. Remus had been deeply embarrassed and they had never spoken about the record again but a few months later Sirius had skived off class and dug the record out of Remus’s trunk and listened through to the end alone in the dormitory with the shades drawn tightly as if someone outside would see. He had received a letter from his parents’ lawyer a few days previous that he couldn’t decipher but was too humiliated to share and two weeks before that Remus had disappeared as he always did to visit his sick aunt but he came back limping. He said he had fallen down the stairs. And Leonard Cohen sang, “I never had a secret chart to get to the heart of this or any other matter…”

“They took all your good memories,” Remus said now; he was mourning them. The tips of his fingers tracing up the veins in Sirius’s arm like rainwater against a window. “So I was in — I bet you still remembered a lot of me.” 

“Yes. How terribly I loved you like a black hole.” It was easier to say things like that as though they were still past tense. “And then how the old man had told me, like right before they locked me up, how he thought you probably wouldn’t wake up from the next full moon.” 

Remus’s face clouded but he was still tracing. It was the arm with the moon chart and he circled one finger around each crooked and uneven circle. 

“He has a right knack for underestimating you. I always thought.” Sirius knew it would take worse than that for Remus to say a bad thing about Dumbledore; indeed he didn't say anything at all. “I can tell you though — when I saw you again for the first time in your office window — ” 

“Stop,” said Remus, “oh my God, I’ll — ” 

“ — you had it just open and you were smoking and you had this sweater on that you used to wear around the flat with nothing else, do you remember that? Except you had slacks on and your hair was grey — ”

“Christ,” said Remus, who had covered his eyes with one hand, because he was crying. “It’s not all grey.” 

“It looked like it was — in the light because you were very far away. Anyway I was starving because I was living in the woods and it was constant horror constant pain constant just remembering things I didn’t want to et cetera and it was like the fucking little match girl like a, like that trippy DMT death moment — ” 

Remus was clutching his hand so tightly it hurt and he had shifted his face away so Sirius could not see how his teeth grit, but he could tell by the tight knot in Remus’s jaw. 

“Anyway I missed — even the sight of you, it was like I’d been wandering in the desert and then — ” Like bending to drink as he had the first time in Northumberland at a cool spring after twelve years drinking warm brackish water that stank like death and bore an oil film, brought to his cell thrice a day in a chalice carven of possibly human bone. “I loved you so much — love you so much. Sorry.” 

“Stop it,” said Remus again. “Fucking — ” When he turned back to Sirius his eyes were red and the dark circles underneath flushed like a strange dusk and his voice was wet and raw. “You sappy fucking git. My heart’s falling out whenever you say a fucking word to me.” 

“You could’ve been — perhaps you were a beat writer in a past life.” 

“Well Brautigan had that, o beautiful was the werewolf in his evil forest…” 

Sirius shifted so he could wrap his hand around Remus’s thigh — warm, a little slick inside. Residual jumpiness in the muscle and inside the bright blue vein the echoing ghost of heartbeat. “You were always so beautiful in your evil forest.” Remus laughed a little but it was like a half-sob with his swallowed tears. “Or the one — ‘Fuck me like fried potatoes…’” 

“Yes,” said Remus, “‘on the most beautifully hungry morning of my god-damn — ” 

Sirius sat up and caught the last word still in Remus’s mouth. Remus’s eyelashes fluttering against his skin. His breath — and his hand alighting like a bird on Sirius’s shoulder. 

\--

He woke at dawn when Remus got up naked and resplendent with hickeys (it did not take altogether so much pressure as Sirius had long-ago learned for him to bruise such that there was even one at the rounded crease of his ass and thigh) and found another pack of cigarettes wherever he was hiding them, tapped it rhythmically in his palm to settle the tobacco, shifted the curtain with two fingers in order to watch intently at something in the window, and finally went to his milk crates of records in the corner. As he crouched and dug through in search of something Sirius watched the artful arrangement of bone and muscle and skin orchestrate. It took him five or ten minutes to find what he was looking for; of course it was _Songs of Leonard Cohen_. 

When he put it on he climbed back in bed and lay on his side and reached for Sirius’s hand between them and ran his thumb back and forth over the knuckles. Mourning, he understood. The music was soft and bare and simple and filled the room and Sirius remembered the shape and the sound of it and the way it flowed into itself like water though he had not listened to it once in over two decades. When he was young it had felt like a map not filled in entirely and now it seemed like a sheer piece laid over what he had managed to sketch back out showing other paths he had forgotten. 

He shut his eyes again and listened. Remus was tracing the moon chart on his forearm again and he grasped Sirius’s elbow warmly and then he pulled the blankets up again over them both. Who had comforted him, Sirius wondered, a sudden cold shock, at the funeral?

\--

**Smashing Pumpkins, _Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness_**

Dumbledore and a few other Order members came over for a dinner meeting that ended with a knife jabbed in the table (surprisingly, by Kingsley) and after a great deal of storming off, pointed door slamming, and spiteful Floo-ing, Remus and Sirius were obliged to clean up the mess remaining in the kitchen. 

“He is going to find some way to take me away from you,” Remus said with a eerie lightness. For ten minutes he had been trying with magic and then finally by hand to pry the knife from the table. “Mark my words.” 

Sirius was scrubbing with steel wool a pot in which Molly had been distracted enough to burn corn chowder. “How’s that?” 

“Did you hear him say, whatever, soon there will come a time when we all must make sacrifices… He looked right at me.” Sirius could have sworn Dumbledore had been looking right at him and he wondered if everyone around the table had had the same impression. “He has some fucking idea — something up his sleeve.” 

“He always has. His sleeves are big enough for any number of dastardly plots.” 

Remus laughed. “That much is true.” He had climbed up on the table in his fraying loafers to brace himself with according leverage. “How the fuck did Kingsley manage this.” 

“Have you ever like, looked at his arms?” 

“Of course,” Remus said, “in fact I had a vague notion to seduce him before the return of the prodigal.” 

Sirius, seethingly jealous of anyone who had so much as jostled Remus’s arm in the subway since 1981, turned back to scrubbing the chowder pot. He heard Remus’s teeth grit and the knife squeaking against the dense wood of the table and finally a thump and a punched-out shove of breath, and Remus said, “A-ha.” 

He was holding the knife triumphantly in his hand and grinning but his brow furrowed when he saw Sirius’s face. “What do you mean Dumbledore’s going to send you away?” Sirius asked. 

“Well what did he do last time?” 

He had not even dared consider that. He remembered how Remus had seemed brittler in those days than he ever had in their complete acquaintance like he had been stretched so thin he could be shattered with a hammer and it was that first of all that had made Sirius suspect. Like even when Remus was with him there was so little of Remus there so the rest had to be somewhere else with someone else. “He can’t — you nearly — ”

“That’s just it, isn’t it,” said Remus, and he came to Sirius’s side to inspect the remaining dishes. “Those of us remaining have demonstrated the necessary resilience. Why don’t you let me do the rest of these with magic.” 

“I can do it.” 

“Want to use my wand?” 

“I mean I can do it by hand.” 

He was having a rather terrible time of it but wouldn’t confess as such to Remus, who pushed up his sleeves, took the sponge from the sink, and started in on the remaining, less dismal pots and pans. “Greyback is still alive,” Remus said. “He’s spent the interim years — well, you know.” 

Doing to more children what had been done to Remus in a still summer wood at sunset, Somerset, 1965, the year of _Help!_ and _Rubber Soul,_ Operation Rolling Thunder, American ground combat troops in Vietnam, Watts and Selma, “Like a Rolling Stone,” the Moors Murders, _A Charlie Brown Christmas_. 

“I will — tie you up in the bed upstairs before I let you go and speak with Greyback again.” 

“I don’t think the old man will consider your sexual whims a valid excuse for anything let alone ‘liaison with vulnerable populations’ as he always called it,” said Remus, but he was smiling a little in the corner of his mouth. 

“I need you here for my mental health.” 

“Yes, well if Dumbledore understood mental health I do not think he would treat Harry as he does.” 

Harry had contacted Sirius a few weeks previous with a very kind letter and a cassette by a band called the Smashing Pumpkins. He was concerned about his new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, a Ministry hack appropriately surnamed Umbridge whose previous job had been systematically assuring Remus would never work at anything besides his current unpaid quasi-employment as secretive dark wizard investigator and kept man. Sirius was glad to hear Harry was apparently over Cobain’s death enough to pursue the work of other emotive American art-school dropouts and he shared the letter with Remus which led of course to an hour’s invective regarding said legislation which Sirius would admit to having fueled in part by continually refilling Remus’s tumbler of firewhiskey while he wasn’t looking. Sirius had listened to the tape later, unable to sleep, and had been vaguely disturbed by Harry’s stated affection for songs with lyrics like “I’m in love with my sadness.” He realized vaguely this was probably how real parents with actual emotions felt about their charges, and he wondered if Harry had started smoking pot yet. 

Remus was still talking. “— most contemporary dark wizard we had reviewed by fifth year was fucking Gilles de Rais and I mainly just worried about how gay I was and why you all had leaves in your mouths.” 

“We had also — it wasn’t like we were babes in the woods.” 

“Well I suppose your father did break your nose third year summer.” 

“You turned inside out once a month. And then I betrayed you.” 

“Every English boarding school romantic friendship needs a good betrayal, Sirius.” 

“And a monstrous possession too I suppose. A greasy jealous villain…” 

“All this Wuthering Heights nonsense and none of the Eldritch Horror bullshit Harry actually has to deal with, is what I’m getting at.” 

“Perhaps then he’ll be better equipped for it than we were.” 

“Perhaps so. I listened to his Pumpkins cassette.” 

“What did you think?” 

Remus smiled a little into the dishwater. “I preferred _Siamese Dream_.” 

“Snob.” 

“It seems to me very likely based on the timing and et cetera that’s what I was listening to in my office in your beautiful psychedelic memory so you should maybe be a tad bit more open-minded.” 

He had finished his dishes and Sirius had been scrubbing a clean pot for five minutes just to stand near him. He snuck a few fingers under the hem of Sirius’s shirt wet and very nervous as though he could not quite believe yet that this was really happening. They went upstairs and put _Siamese Dream_ on and Sirius lit candles with his fingers. In three days’ time they were summoned by Dumbledore into the Floo where he made a polite request of Remus if he would maybe perhaps pay a visit to his old contacts in Snowdonia upon the occasion of the next full moon. 

\--

Dumbledore had escorted him to Azkaban on a strange craft set off from an alcove near the town of Waren Mill. They were accompanied by several Magical Law Enforcement officers doing a two-month Azkaban detail after which they would be cycled out for at least five years and subject to routine psychological examinations. Long ago he had stopped laughing and now he was just very tired. He sat in the boat bound at the wrists with an unfamiliar spell and his hair whipped across his face and he understood for a very long time now this brackish wind would be the only wind there was. 

The keep had been constructed harrowingly upon a granite uprise that could scarcely be called an island. It looked more like Corbenic than any of the hypothesized Corbenics did, he thought when they were close enough he could glean the shape and the architecture out of the thunderstorm sky. It drained the color even from the black sea. It was a sucking black hole place — a drain into hell, if there was one. Dumbledore and the MLE officers were watching him to see how he would react and as such he kept his face very still. Beneath the sea’s roaring was a profound silence. 

There was an anteroom — he later thought of it as a sort of airlock — conceded in recent years for this very purpose in which he was stripped and searched and his hair was cut with magic. He was given a uniform of black and white stripes like a Muggle chain gang movie and the first of his tattoos which later he had covered with his own ink markings, a series of numbers delineating his casefile with the MLE. It was done with a strange machine in a single painful second. Dumbledore was standing in the door. Already he could feel that thing pressing down and wrapping around. Suffocation of darkness. He thought of Remus; it felt like he had snatched the memory as it was tugging away. This was the same sort of machine they had used to tattoo Remus at the werewolf registry when he had turned seventeen. He had not wanted Sirius in the room with him but Sirius had insisted. He remembered Remus had a hickey at his neck and he was jealous and that the examiner was pale with overwork with deep purple rings under his eyes and wouldn’t touch Remus’s skin. 

The MLE squad left and then Dumbledore did and if he had left Sirius with any parting words he did not remember them. He waited. His feet were bare. He could feel them in the hallway inside and then they were at the door — three of them, and they jostled one another to see him. To taste what was left of his life. It was like being scored out with some blunt instrument. 

At first he could tell them apart from one another. They wore different sorts of robes and some had baubles — jewelry or trinkets, _spoils of war_ , Sirius thought. There were at least fifty of them in Azkaban and they smelled like dust and rot. Like dead mushrooms — like the cellar of an abandoned house. 

One of them came to his side and touched his elbow with the shredding black sleeve where a human’s hand would be. The touch even through his rough canvas uniform was like a dry ice burn. It pushed up until he stood. In the door now there were two more and standing in the pentagram of them he felt colder than he had ever been in his life such that he scarcely could walk. Already they had reached in his mind and started pulling out the things they liked and they were so eager and joyous to feed on something fresh at last that they pressed close and he could feel their breath. They helped him up from his hands and knees pulling at the fabric of his collar like a lioness would lift cubs. 

They took every bit of James and Lily aside from their corpses in the house at Godric’s Hollow and they took most of the child and then very carefully they took Remus because they knew likely much of it could be used to torture him down the road. They excised it cleanly like a sort of lobotomy. They took the things like how Remus made tea and how he sat to read and what kinds of songs he liked and the tiny furrow of concentration in his brow when he would do magic. Remus when he was very stoned and rambled about Arthurian legend and/or his favorite song on the White Album (weirdly, “Yer Blues”) and/or the werewolf legislation of assorted Polynesian island nations. The tiny stupid fucking things he would do like when he would come in the kitchen and watch Sirius do dishes and rest his chin on his shoulder. Like sometimes when they were in bed together and Remus would look in his eyes like he was drowning. Basically they took everything about how he loved Remus so much it made him want to dance down the street like he was in a Gershwin musical — how it made him think of the rhythm speeding up like a heartbeat in Patti Smith’s “Gloria” — and they left everything about how he loved Remus so much it was like a black stone calcifying in his heart and guts and everywhere else. How it was like being dragged down into some seething wreckage of mud bombed-out and leveled and devastated, how hollowing, how starving. How even despite that he had been certain. He had sought conjecture that struck him as proof. He had looked while Remus slept at his forearms and inside his elbows. Then he had stood in the 4am kitchen light chainsmoking. It had felt like sleeping next to the atomic bomb. 

They left the rat — they left the full cinematic detail of both murders he had attempted and failed. They left the hour he spent waiting at the door to the hospital wing in James’s invisibility cloak listening to Remus crying. At the time he had thought naively that was the worst he would ever feel. 

He sat in his cell and went through the names. Harry James Lily Remus and the Rat. Harry James Lily Remus and the Rat. They were hovering outside the door because they could feel him thinking and when he thought hard enough they would snatch it. James and Remus in glitter eye makeup (borrowed from and mostly applied by Dorcas) at a Brian Eno gig. James laughing so hard he had to hold a hand over his face to keep the mandrake leaf in his mouth. Remus when he saw the dog and the stag for the first time in the shack half an hour before moonrise. Remus at the record shop on Tottenham Court Road perusing the Ls with his mouth just open in concentration. Two weeks after Things Had Changed. It felt like the big secret they were keeping from everything even from the war itself like there was some untouched place they had found where it did not exist and it was just the two of them, their skin, records, television. Very late nights. Fucking in the early morning and arriving twenty minutes late to an Order meeting at the Hog’s Head and Remus’s hair was damp and loosely curled with sweat at the back of his neck. 

He huddled as close to the narrow window as the dared in the cold and he watched at the sea and in the rhythm of the waves he thought, Harry James Lily Remus and the Rat. He found the rusty nail on the fourth day but by the time he had managed to make it sharp enough to tattoo himself with the mantra was different because he no longer could remember their names and he hardly could remember their faces except when the wind blew in and stirred the air sometimes in the night. He spent more and more time in the dog’s body and always when he came back to human form he was vaguely surprised that he had one. He remembered holding Guilt in his arms. Guilt’s wild nowhere-map of scars. The day that Guilt walked out; it was September. He remembered the moment he lifted Dead by the shoulders and cradled the body which bore no marks but already was cold. Also Dead who had fallen before the child’s crib with her red hair wild on the Oriental carpet. The black blast mark against the wall. The unbloody wound upon the child’s forehead. And the rat — sinuous in the gutter. 

He watched at the clouds but they never seemed to move. He didn’t recall the feeling of the sun and for a while he forgot there was one. Once he watched a lost buoy drift on the waves until it was out of sight. It was the only color he had seen besides his own blood for perhaps years. 

\--

He woke past noon in the Spring fog to find Remus had left for Snowdonia while he slept. He had done this during the last war to keep from fighting and Sirius had found it suspicious and as such had tried to stay awake all night until eventually he was doing it on the living room couch where he languished in spiritual agony with his blues LPs and even sometimes the old dusty Zeppelin records of his uncle Alphard’s that he’d unearthed from the mostly embarrassing collection relegated to boxes in the hall closet. “If it keeps on raining the levee’s gonna break…” Customarily he would fall asleep at the end of side A and wake up at dawn to find Remus had gone, upon which occasion he would start drinking and something of glass or porcelain would wind up shattered on the floor. By the time Remus returned, if he did, Sirius’s drunk was going out on him and and had started the Zeppelin record from the beginning again and he had made it through at least a half a pack of cigarettes. Remus would smell like woods and like leather and like something burnt. Usually they would fuck mostly clothed against the wall in the foyer and find afterward they had not locked or warded the door — but the last time, he had had Remus on his belly in the bed amidst his mussed red velvet blankets, and they had not looked once in each other’s eyes, and he doubted Remus had come at all. That night like any number of others he had waited awake on the couch for the morning. That restless naked tearing autumn had started blowing in on a bad wind and there wasn’t much that didn’t flay him open to the bones. Remus had come in the living room at dawn with very dark circles under his eyes and he had taken a cigarette and made very charred toast and then he had gone out without saying a word. Sirius had watched his back in the door thinking, don’t fucking leave me. Don’t you dare fucking leave me. Of course Remus had because Sirius had in fact been daring him to for a very long time. 

After that he had slept in the bed they had once shared pressing his face into the pillows breathing deeply to catch the hint of citrus-mint bergamot that had always been on Remus’s breath and in his hair. Remus had been sleeping at tube stations and at bus stops, but he had told Sirius this only two weeks previous. He had not dared go to Hogwarts to see Dumbledore and he shoplifted his dinner and he had quit smoking out of necessity. In late September 1981 he had been allowed an audience with Greyback he claimed to not much remember but for the simple and chilling fact that he himself had been the taller, by a good ten centimeters, between the two of them. 

This time Remus had left a note on the bedside table with the ink deeply gauged into the parchment and the handwriting slanting heavily in his hurry: 

_I know you used to hate when I did this but my nerves feel like sharp wire and I won’t survive speaking to you. Fuck this deja vu, it’s like rewinding into my worst ever memories except I don’t even get to be young._

_Love — see you tomorrow. RJL_

He had pinned the parchment under his disgusting Nalgene bottle congealing Wolfsbane potion in the bottom of it. 

“Fuck you, Remus,” he said aloud, affectionately. His voice split a little with sleep. When he glanced warily toward the mirror in the slant of pale morning light through the window he looked like one of those opiate-soused late-seventies New York punk bandleaders with vaguely more feeling in the eyes. Even worse tattoos. Older — sadder. Rats’ nest hair. To think he had once had to put on actual makeup (stolen, always, from Dorcas, who had finally taught him to apply it in the men’s room of a gay club in 1978) to get the appropriate Richard Hell look. 

“Eat your breakfast,” said the mirror tiredly. 

“Senile — ” Sirius muttered. He found his clothes on the floor where the previous night he had thrown them. “ — old bat.” 

He was buttoning his shirt with one hand whilst he went for the door holding in the other Remus’s Nalgene bottle which he intended to soak in boiling water and he probably should not have tried to do so much at once but he was feeling emboldened by the _Love_ in the note, which was how he ended up fumbling the water bottle and punting it down the stairs in his attempt to catch it. It slammed down to the first floor with a series of hollow musical thuds and in the narrow cavernous hall it rolled, in what seemed like dramatic slow motion, to a halt at the foot of his mother’s portrait. It took him five or ten minutes to pull the curtains shut leaving him privy to an extended and earsplitting invective with which he, for once, could not help but agree — _I KNEW WE WERE JUSTIFIED NO MATTER WHAT THE LAWYERS SAID KEEPING YOU LOCKED IN YOUR ROOM ALL THAT SUMMER BECAUSE CERTAINLY IT SEEMS THAT’S YOUR STRONGEST SUIT EVEN THOSE DEGENERATES AND BEASTS AND BESMIRCHERS AND MUDBLOODS YOU CALL YOUR FRIENDS AND EVEN YOUR PRECIOUS HELLHOUND CREATURE SEE FIT TO LEAVE YOU WHERE THEY CAN MANAGE YOU AND CAN YOU BLAME THEM? YOU ALWAYS WERE WORSE THAN A HANDFUL EVERYTHING YOU EVER TOUCHED IN YOUR MISERABLE LIFE TURNED TO SHIT AND WHEN IT WAS AT THE EXPENSE OF YOUR FAMILY YOU TOOK SUCH PLEASURE IN IT AND AS SUCH YOU DO NOT KNOW THE THRILL IT GIVES ME TO SEE YOU GET YOUR JUST DESSERTS — HOW I LAUGH NOW TO REMEMBER THE DAYS YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD GET ONE OVER ON YOUR FATHER AND ME — YOU CAN’T DRAIN ONE DROP OF YOUR BLACK BLOOD, CHANGELING…_

\--

At sunset Sirius watched the full heavy moon hover fluorescent under the horizon and finally slip above the city blocks in the bedroom window and listened to Harry’s Smashing Pumpkins cassette. He tried not to sleep telling himself he awaited Remus’s return but understanding realistically it was only that he feared nightmares. At last he could keep his eyes open no longer and indeed his dreams were black and intercut with his mother’s words and he was slamming on his cell door in Azkaban peering through the narrow window where he had once stood to watch his captors lead in some unfortunate screaming and raw reduced to unself by their touch and their nearness — watching through his narrow window into the imagined bloody clearing where Greyback (hunched, animal, clothes rent, stinking of iron) pressed his swollen meaty fist entire into Remus’s mouth. 

A few hours after dawn he woke feeling the thread of yearning from the kitchen. He nearly tripped over himself running downstairs to find of course it was Remus at the table mending his several wounds with his wand. His shirt was nowhere to be seen and he had draped himself in his big secondhand-store wool coat which was rent to show the fraying lining and dark with blood and otherwise and inside it his narrow shoulders were hunched and he smelled like fear. 

“Alright?” Sirius asked in the door. 

Remus looked up startledly; he was cut across the face, across the bridge of the nose. In the pale early light there were heavy dark circles under his eyes and Sirius was sure if he did something rash like run to Remus’s side to lick him clean of blood Remus would spook like a half-wild horse. “Fine,” he said. He bent again to his work. He was making a third or fourth pass against something on his thigh. “I stopped by Hogwarts and Dumbledore helped with the worst of it.” 

All Sirius could do, which was perhaps really all he had ever done, was go to the stove and put water on for tea. His heart felt like it was reaching out through its cage of ribs. 

“Do you remember what we talked about at the Six Arms the night — ” 

“Yes.” 

“Well it hasn’t changed a bit despite everything else has.” Remus appeared satisfied with the state of his leg so he stood to get his jeans off; they were destroyed. He was missing one boot and the other was torn across the toe neat through the leather like a wound in flesh; he loosened the lace and kicked it off. “I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said, sitting down again. When he tugged his coat tighter around himself Sirius saw his hands were raw and red as if wind-burnt or gnawed. 

“It’s alright,” Sirius told him. “I take it they — ”

“They were convinced by… I don’t know, actually, perhaps by Greyback or by one of the Death Eaters. The Dark Lord’s side is an easier sell, I suppose.” 

“It was last time as well you always said.” 

“It’s easier to — ” he swallowed. “To just go under. You understand this.” 

Sirius nodded. “Let me fix your face.” 

“I’ve tried, it’s — so did Dumbledore. It’s cursed, I don’t know how. It won’t go away.” 

On the range the kettle boiled. “It looks dashing,” Sirius told him, pouring two mugsful of hot water. “Do you want chamomile.” 

Remus shook his head. “Earl Grey. Please.” 

“It’ll keep you up.” 

“That’s alright. With cream and — ”

“I know how you like it,” said Sirius, offended. Carefully he fixed it. Remus was watching him from the table with his head propped up in one hand and the other holding his wool coat closed around the chest. The pink lines where he had zipped himself back up were raised just some and he was trying to keep as many as he could from sight. “Did they — ” 

Remus nodded slowly. His eyes were gently closed. When he took his hand gingerly from his coat to wrap around the warm mug Sirius saw the wounds concentrated at the lower ridge of his ribcage. At his gut where animals would go upon a fresh kill. Nausea curled in his own belly at the sight of it. “They all — it was like _Wicker Man,_ ” Remus said. 

“How did you get out?” 

“Patronus.” 

“You can cast a Patronus like — ”

“I didn’t know it was possible. Dumbledore was surprised when I told him. I ran — hid. Apparated at dawn.” He blew across the surface of his tea to cool it. “My heart won’t — Sirius it won’t slow down.”

In the afternoon, Sirius thought, while Remus slept, he would put his head in the Floo so help him and he would call Dumbledore and he would give the old man a piece of his fucking mind. He had sent Remus on enough suicide missions in 1980 when he was twenty years old and had graduated magna cum laude from Hogwarts and yet had been turned down from every graduate program and every job he had applied to by simple virtue of something that had been done to him when he was a child. And Dumbledore had used — had twisted his self-hatred and his sense of utter uselessness much as he had twisted Sirius’s own. And it had wound out for both of them into twelve years of pure hell as perhaps it had been intended to. Yet even after that it seemed Dumbledore still saw fit to keep twisting, as though he were wringing out a dishcloth. 

“Don’t be upset,” Remus said. He was very tired. 

“How can I not be upset.” 

Remus didn’t say another word after that. They finished their tea and Sirius helped him up (they left his clothes in the kitchen) and together they went upstairs to bed where Remus gingerly took off his big coat and his socks and his underwear deliberately not meeting Sirius’s eye. 

“I don’t mind your scars.” 

“I know you don’t. You’ve always been funny about it.” 

“Your irrepressible survival instinct is one of like the top seven sexiest things about you I’ve always thought.” 

“Seven, eh.”

“Let’s maybe talk about them after you sleep.” 

“I don’t want to sleep.” 

“Well then — ”

“I have to tell you what I was — ” Remus yawned — “I thought I was about to die and I was thinking about you waiting for me at the table in the kitchen with a cup of tea and cold dinner waiting to put me to bed. And so I didn’t meant to do it. I didn’t know I could. It just came out like a big white ghost and I felt all the — all the tearing, all the teeth, all of it stop.” 

Sirius sat down carefully on the edge of the bed. 

“I thought it was — well I thought I was really dead for a second and then I thought it was your Patronus, but it was — it was mine.” 

Sirius had only seen it a few times in 1980 in moments of dire peril and utter horror — a skinny wide-faced silver wolf, tall, long legs, smart eyes — because Remus didn’t like it and he only cast it when he had to. He wished it had been his — he wished he had been there warded in the brush watching — “Sometimes,” he started, feeling in his voice fifteen years’ exhaustion, reciting McGonagall’s words when he had asked her after several glasses of sherry how he could have remembered the Dinas Bran runes, “under stress, it’s like there’s this _spiritus mundi_ , to quote Yeats — ” 

“Don’t fucking — I’m the academic and this is me chalking it all up to the abstract, okay? You know what the old man says about how, how Harry only lived because of Lily’s, all of Lily’s love?” Sirius had long doubted it was that simple and he knew Remus did as well but he nodded. Remus reached between them and grasped tightly in his clammy hand Sirius’s arm that bore the moonchart cataloging the tidal cyclicality that rooted this and everything. “I would have died six hours ago if I didn’t love you, do you get it?” 

He turned his head but an inch toward Remus whose mouth was there warm and red and just open, blood-sweet, who pulled him close and reached in his shirt for his heartbeat. Since this whole arrangement’s surprise commencement Sirius had felt they fit together like the continents or like some archeological relic shattered and unearthed with the vitrine light shining fluorescent through the rough places — something that had been unpieced and re-stitched as best as it could be but not without some conjecture and some uncertain fumbling. Puzzle pieces were too easy; they feared parts of one another. 

Never in his life before had he managed to get Remus on his back in bed for more than thirty seconds without holding him there and perhaps it was just his exhaustion or the tidal wash of his adrenaline back out of his fear but Sirius pressed him gently down and he stayed. His hands loosened and then tightened again at Sirius’s neck and shoulder snagging in his hair — he could feel Remus’s breath in his ribs. His shattering heart. The places where the now-healedish wounds still bled under the skin and would come morning be bruised in the lovely crepuscular gradient of rotting blood. 

He was so — he was a man shut up ever in the cage of himself. So it was strange that in his company Sirius felt most untrapped and free — like still there were places on the planet he had not tread — like the house wasn’t getting ever smaller nor his mother’s voice ever louder nor his Black blood ever colder nor the thread of screaming fear ever tighter — wound as it was through his very marrow even now nearly three years’ gone from the clutches of any Dementor. 

“Love you,” Remus said, like in a dream. Sirius’s mouth was under his ear, pressing in his hair; he smelled like woods, like blood, like something burning, like bergamot and sugar, like dawn. “I love you.” Like he had never said it before. Which perhaps he had not, or at least not aloud. 

\--

**Spacemen 3, _Recurring_**

Remus woke early and went to the bakery. Out the window Sirius watched him in the street and the way he moved when no one was watching. How he paused at the corner to take a cigarette from his pocket and light it. His mouth just a little open. Bruising bloom inside his collar. His long legs: his pants were too short despite he had let the hem down and he showed an inch and a half of ankle above his scuffed fraying loafers like some Victorian seductress. He jangled the change in his pockets. All his clothes were different sizes and of different eras and assembled as if in the dark from citywide thrift stores and/or the bowels of Grimmauld Place. When he had recently gotten laid he walked like the first minute of Zeppelin's “Good Times Bad Times” was playing on loop in his head. He made Sirius’s mouth dry up. 

\--

Harry had written a letter he had been obliged to have delivered by an owl from the postmaster’s in Hogsmeade on account of Umbridge’s policies and yet still it arrived at the window of the parlor room at Grimmauld Place looking rather harried and pursued. Remus was out; he was not fully healed from his stint in Snowdonia, but Dumbledore had sent him to deal with a centaur herd in Exeter. Sirius had protested and had felt so feeble and silent and unseen doing it — as though he were already a ghost — that he had overcompensated. He didn’t remember what spell he had attempted but Dumbledore had hexed him with boils. He had the draw of a Wild West gunslinger and about the compassion, Sirius thought later as he lay on the couch in an agony of humiliation while Remus perused the Black family library for the countercurse. 

There was a quiet playful something in Remus’s mouth. “Are you _smiling_?” Sirius demanded. 

“You tried to hex Dumbledore without a wand. You’re lucky you’re alive.” 

Sirius was going to say, he wouldn’t’ve killed me. But he could not think of a single reason he was indispensable. To get his mind off the subject he said to Remus, “These are painful fucking boils.” 

Remus was drawing a finger quickly and rather excessively erotically down the page of _Myrtle Montgomery’s Handy Spells for Ladies_ and slowly as Sirius watched he lifted his finger to his mouth and wet it inside his lip to flip to the next page. “I’m sure they are.” 

Now he had not heard from Remus in three days and as such in a wild fit of deja vu he threw the window open (exhilarated by the touch of the cool April air) and tugged the owl in bodily by its foot. He hated his disappointment when the handwriting on the envelope was Harry’s. The red wax seal on the rear flap was hasty and flattened with a thumbprint and there were rounded and furling ink fingerprints on the paper. The letter inside was rushed and messy constituting two pages of large and jagged and hardly legible handwriting and tucked in with them was, as usual, a cassette tape: _Alien Lanes_ by Guided by Voices. 

He peeked through the curtains and sought the owl’s pursuers in the sky and when he didn’t see any he took her around to the kitchen for a few treats and water in a ceramic dish. Then he went back to the parlor and put the tape on and read the letter. 

_Sirius, I’m so sorry to write this to you but honestly I do not know who else to talk to. I worry about scaring Ron and Hermione and Dumbledore’s gone —_

This Sirius had not known. 

_— and I worry something is really wrong with me. Like I worry I am a danger to myself and others. I’m so sorry. I don’t want to hurt anyone but it feels like that’s all I can do. Even and especially when I don’t mean it. Like even when I’m sleeping I do it. I feel like all I do is sit in this room and hurt people and when I want to help they won’t let me out. I don’t know, do you ever feel like this? I’m really nervous all the time and I feel guilty about everything I touch. I feel like the one thing I’ve ever done well in my life is the DA which is like — I’m scared all the time that it / everything will be taken away from me. Is that okay? I feel like it isn’t okay for me to be afraid but I am. I don’t know who else to talk to about this._

_I miss you and I hope we can talk in person soon. If you want to write back please send it c/o Roonil Wazlib to the Hogsmeade postmaster’s. This album has been making me feel a little better but Dean just gave me their new record. My favorite song is “My Valuable Hunting Knife.” Love, Harry_

_P.S. Please tell Professor Lupin that Hermione liked the Amps tape more than me but I did like it especially “Bragging Party.”_

All the songs on _Alien Lanes_ were approximately ninety seconds long so perhaps ten of them had played in the time it took Sirius to digest Harry’s letter enough to start attempting a response. 

_Something is really wrong with you but it’s alright_ , he started. When he read it back over he winced. He tore that inch off the parchment and tried again. _Harry, something is really wrong with all of us, I think, but it’s maximally out of our control, and that big wrong thing is this war / this big darkness. I always used to feel it even before Azkaban like a massive heavy suffocating wool blanket. Like crushing / strangling all the good feelings out of and away from you. That is what times like these do to people and it’s not your fault. All of us are the sort of targets or receptacles of pure dumb deeply bad, like extremely horrific “luck” in that we have to walk in this every minute of ever second of every day — because we made ourselves complicit, by being caring people and by wanting justice and by wanting to stand up for what’s right and what’s real. When you think of the alternative I think it doesn’t sound appetizing nor does it jive with either of our morals ie. we could have stayed out of this if you had decided not to come to Hogwarts, and I probably could have stayed out of it if I had stayed in Azkaban. But then likely all of our friends would be hurting and we just wouldn't know about it._

_Remus and I were talking_ , he wrote, and then he stopped and looked at Remus’s name and wondered if he should write Professor Lupin. But he decided to keep going — _about how when we were your age we were just worrying about comparatively stupid shit. Like we were in the middle of the Animagus thing and I was convinced that I would turn into like a disgusting sea lion or a slug or something else useless and I lay awake nights worrying that in what was supposed to be this meaningful moment of solidarity with someone I loved I would just be like a snorting pile of blubber. But then when we both grew up and we knew that we had to do the right thing we were woefully unprepared and as such we both fell prey to great deal of conjecture-as-evidence, suspicion, infighting, etc._

_I am really really sorry that you have lived this war for your whole life like I am sorrier for it than anything else because a large part of it is my fault as you know. So, in this, two things: 1) Possibly the beginning of all this pure unmitigated horror was that I was looking for reasons to distrust Remus and as such I was easily convinced that in fact there were some. So I suggest that you trust your friends. You won't scare them because they are very brave! 2) Being afraid and nervous and guilty is the nature of this fucking beast. You can ask any of us who are still alive from the last time around. You will make yourself more afraid by worrying about being afraid. Let it pass over you and through you etc. (By the way that was your dad’s favorite Muggle book… Frank Herbert’s_ _Dune_ _… You might read it when you have time). If you are worried that things will be taken from you then they will be. You should try very very hard to hang on to them; that is what I am trying to do._

_Thank you for this tape — my favorite is “Watch Me Jumpstart.” I will tell Remus about Hermione and the Amps LP when he comes back from Exeter. I also think he will like Guided by Voices. We have been listening to the new one from Pavement._

Is this too many we’s, he wondered. Still he tried another: 

_We will see each other soon and come out of this. I know so… I feel like I am clinging by my fingernails. Trust your friends. Love, Sirius_

When he finished the letter he scrubbed his hands over his face. He had been writing the last five minutes in silence because he had finished the tape, so he stood to flip it back over to side A and listen again. Then he read the text over once more. He could do a little magic with quills, he was finding; some of the stuff he had been able to manage by fourth year like fixing grammar and spelling with a touch to the parchment. In the kitchen the owl had pecked her way through half the loaf of bread Remus had brought back from his foray to the bakery and as such she looked up at Sirius guiltily when he went to fetch her. He addressed the roll of parchment to Roonil Wazlib c/o Hogsmeade Postmaster’s Office and sent the owl off through the kitchen window. 

The song on the tape player was “Game of Pricks.” “I waited too long to have you hide in the back of me — I cheated so long I don’t know how you keep track of me — ”

He fast-forwarded the tape to the next track. He wasn’t like Remus with his collection of music collaterally damaged in a series of emotional hurricanes. He sat on the couch and listened and had a cigarette and eventually he got up and cut the owl-mauled bits off the bread and toasted the rest and made a pathetic sandwich with leftovers from the fridge. One other thing Harry had going for him, Sirius reasoned, which he really should have mentioned in his response, was that he could stand to talk about his feelings with real-ish words for more than five seconds. Neither he nor Remus had yet managed this and they were grown men. 

If he could write a letter like Harry’s to Remus what would it say? He almost laughed thinking of it. He reached for another roll of parchment and tried just to see if he could. After tapping the feather end of the quill against the paper for a while he dared to start: _I love you like a well in the desert — I love you like blood. I love you more than magic. I am terrified at how much I love you. I think I would be happier if I could live inside you. I want to die at the same time as you because I couldn’t bear anything else._

Once he had started it was easier. After a few moments he could hardly read his own handwriting. 

_Even before anything really happened and even before I knew that sex was possible I think I always wanted you more than I had you like there was a tiny separate valve in my heart that said this is not enough. Like I always wanted to hold you while you turned inside out and then I wanted to lick all your wounds. In second year for like a month or so I was going to ask you to bite me because I couldn’t stand to not be with you and that was the only way I could think of. Actually James talked me out of it. Probably he knew more about the two of us than either of us did or than he ever let on, the wanker._

_You make me feel like the best ever acid trip ever had by anyone honestly looking at you is like a Spacemen 3 record. Or Christmas dinner or the Grand Canyon. Blah blah blah history and multiverse and everything. Don’t you feel like we’ve known each other for thousands of years?_

_I don’t want to feel guilty anymore and I don’t want you to either — it guts me — and I wonder what I need to do, and if I can even do it, any spell, any weird sex thing, or I’ll buy you flowers, or we could move to America. I’m too old for any of this. I would rather have a cuppa with fifty Dementors than watch him send you away again. Honestly it feels like — how could the kiss be worse than that / worse than this feeling which is now I do not really certainly know if you’re alive or dead?_

_How did you survive the eighties? I can’t believe how much you love me. It scares me most of all how much you love me._

At the end of the sentence he pressed the tip of the quill into the paper until the black blot spread out dark as oil into the tangle of words. He heard the cassette click at the end of the side; he remembered none of the music that had played the last twenty minutes. His sandwich was abandoned half-eaten on chipped ceramic on the floor. 

He read the letter back again from the beginning. His heart seared — it burned. He felt sick, and the flame in his fingers was cold. It ate the parchment up into curling grey ashes in seconds flat. 

\--

At dusk as Sirius perused the cassette catalog for the nth time in search of the newest Guided by Voices tape Remus came in the front door with the smell of the spring breeze and Indian spices. 

“I forgot what kind of curry you like, Sirius,” he said; he seemed shaken by it. He was very tired. “I just got cashew.” 

“Cashew’s fine,” Sirius told him. He too had forgotten what kind of curry he had liked best in his misspent youth. 

“I got pakoras too and rice and — I’m starving. And I went to the record store.” He passed Sirius the brown paper bag pockmarked with raindrops, containing Spacemen 3’s _Recurring_. 

I must live in the freshest hell, Sirius thought when he saw the multicolored psychedelic cover. “Did you win the lottery or something?” 

“The centaurs were impressed by my vocabulary and philosophy and et cetera and as such they agreed on a conference with Dumbledore,” Remus explained. “He said I should treat myself to a nice dinner. He gave me fifty galleons but as we can’t go out — ”

“ _Fifty_ galleons.” 

“Yes, so I bought an eighth of pot and my weight in Indian food and I want to get stoned and eat in bed.”

They went upstairs into the bedroom where Sirius busied himself dissecting a cigarette for the paper and shredding a few buds on top of a back issue of the _Prophet_ whilst Remus served curry and rice and pakoras onto two of the Blacks’ finest bone china plates. Then he went to the stereo and put _Recurring_ on. From the first strike of the guitar like a woozy desert matchflare Sirius thought his heart would break. The sound of it was heavy and dry, heat rising in planes from the sun-warmed earth, and the sky a vivid blue, and the way Remus’s back shifted in his shirt when he bent to take off his loafers — and he had not even taken a single hit off the joint yet. 

“Are you going to light that or what,” said Remus. 

They smoked and then they ate ravenously laughing about forgotten jokes and centaur commentary and theories regarding Dumbledore’s sex life and then at some point the plates were abandoned on the floor and Remus had gotten up to start the record over again and they lay very close together in the bed looking up at the spreading cracks in the ceiling staining black where the rainwater came through just some and just in pure eschatological downpour but enough to leave marks like rivers on ancient maps or like scars… Remus’s shoulder was pressed up in Sirius’s armpit and Remus’s head was on his bicep and his hand was in Remus’s hair and he could feel Remus’s heart in his arm all the way up his own side beating just off rhythm with his own. 

Track 2: “You know bars cannot hold me — and brute force cannot control me now — I want to show you how I love you, girl — ”

“It’s a shame,” said Remus contemplatively, “that all this music is so — ” Before he could finish he started laughing this helpless convulsing and nearly silent laugh that Sirius had not heard nor seen for fifteen years and the very existence of it almost frightened him like it could not be witnessed for if witnessed it would no longer be. And then the universe would have been robbed of something on caliber with like, Stonehenge. Remus pressed his nose tightly against Sirius’s shoulder. “ — so, so very heterosexual.” 

“God, um, I guess I could — we could get up and put on Queen.” 

Remus cackled wildly. “Do you ever think it’s so funny that Voldemort’s like, right-hand bodyservant doesn’t believe Freddy Mercury was a flaming queer.” 

“They’re not — it’s not like Voldemort and his gang of merry men are famously progressive and open-minded.” 

“It’s not that it’s — their complete lack of attention to the obvious.” 

Sirius laughed. “Perhaps true.” 

This music felt stretching through his very bones. Remus kept shivering like at some new and special sound a chill would pass up his spine and through Sirius. Aspens in a forest. He was remembering the words from his letter. _I love you more than magic — you are better than the best acid trip ever had by anyone…_

Track 3: “Just the way that you walk — just the way that you talk — just the way that you laugh when you’re talking to me makes my life worthwhile…” 

Remus laughed a little but also Sirius could tell he was crying. 

“Set me free — baby I’ve got the key — ”

All of that stuff he had written was the half of it, he was thinking. It was — there was the words part of it and then there was the rest of it which was without words and which was larger than anything — which was the biggest thing he had ever touched which was bigger than the war which was bigger than the world. 

“Sirius,” Remus said softly, turning toward him; his eyes reflected beyond a mirror, something out of pure eternity, and his voice was soft as breath, velvet, summer, “Sirius, I — ” 

The kiss they shared tasted like curry. _Madras_ , he remembered. 

\--

**Pavement, _Wowee Zowee_**

In a dream he stood before the crypt at Dinas Bran making rubbings of the runic inscriptions intended as update to those made by MacLeod et al in 1910. He recalled that four of that twelve-person archeological crew, all of them Oxford graduates, had spent their remaining and abbreviated lifetimes in St. Mungo’s following the dig. Two suicides and one “suspicious drowning” reported sensationally by the _Prophet_ and the Irish Wizarding _Times_ had followed and as such no further forays were made and the entry to the crypt was heavily warded so as to allow for Muggle tourism. As such this particular investigation had hired solely archeologists with compromised wills to live. He had had to present his case to the foreman whose name was Jones in an office at the Ministry. His misery was rated within a few percentage points of accuracy and he was signed on as a temporary employee of the British Museum and sigiled assorted paperwork freeing said museum as well as the Ministry and the prestigious Magical Archaeology Review, the sponsors of the dig, of any and all liability. Then, in the manner of dreams, he showed up in Llangollen and walked up the hill and around the ruins. Like one of the Gruffydds or Madogs in the ancient days he looked out into the fog across the wild and windy moors and the valleys and the winding silver line of the river like a memory out of Pensieve or a dropped necklace upon an emerald velvet bed. Then he climbed into the ground. 

Peter Pettigrew was in there looking much as he had fifth year before he had lost twenty pounds (and, they had joked, a tiny piece of his soul) in pursuit of Mary MacDonald. Crowning him was the great door firmly set into the earth bearing the infamous inscription and the gaslights scattered about gave him a yellowish complexion even more sickly than was customary. “Wotcher, Moony.” 

“Hullo, Pete.” 

He bit his tongue on _where’s Sirius and James_. Peter had never liked it when he asked that. 

“There’s charcoal and parchment paper,” said Peter. He gestured wth his false hand at a pile in the corner. “We’re to make rubbings.” 

“I thought — well I thought there would be actual digging. Anyone can make rubbings.” 

“No digging at Dinas Bran,” said Peter, “are you crazy? You don’t even have a graduate degree.” 

He tried to hold the paper up and in place with magic but he couldn’t reach the well of it. His handle on it was slipping. It was hovering around himself searing in the air humid and sweaty and clammy wet and he couldn’t get it to do a thing he asked. 

“It’s alright,” said Peter from the back corner. His charcoal scratching against the paper against the wall. “It happens to everyone.” 

“Where is _everyone_ , Pete?” 

“I don’t know. Where do you think they are?” 

He held the paper up to the wall with his left forearm and pressed the charcoal across by the wide sweeping flat of it with his right hand. The stone was so cold he felt it seep into his very bones. The runes appeared woven and tangled and hardly legible due to the simple fact of their decorative calligraphy. 

_SEVEN — LIFTING —_

“What’s on this wall,” he asked Peter. 

“The listing of the plagues, Jones says.” 

“Right.” 

_DANCE — LIFTING — SEVEN VEILS —_

“Plagues, you said?” 

“Apocalypses, what have you, given translation.” 

Apocalypse in literal translation from the Greek: _uncovering_. The lifting — 

“Pete,” Remus said, voice half-wild, “we should open the door.” 

“Have you already fucking lost it?” 

“It’s alright. It’s just — ” 

States changing, Dumbledore had explained. Solid to liquid to gas. Had he not paid attention in elemental potions? Like a teapot boiling — screaming. And the echo in the kitchen, in the silent house —

He woke up on the couch in the parlor room in a cold sweat. Someone had thrown over him an itchy wool blanket. Probably it had been Tonks, who came in with Earl Grey (no sugar, Remus noted) and a plate of stale biscuits. She was wearing a scarf to hide the throttling ring of hickeys on her neck. Where was the Wilfred Owen poem about the young and their insatiable wartime grief-fucking, Remus wondered. 

“You were dreaming,” Tonks observed. 

“Yes.” 

“I shouldn’t’ve — ” 

“No, it’s alright.” He broke a biscuit and pressed his thumb into the crumbs. He had found that touching food a lot customarily led people to believe you were eating it but perhaps Tonks was smarter than that. “I shouldn’t be — what time is it?” 

“Around six PM.” 

He chanced a look in the window. The moon was up and relegated to its late afternoon corner. Only two days until the judgment. He had taken his first dose of Wolfsbane but had not decided whether or not he would finish the course. He could feel already the stretching tide of it at his bones gnawing and starved; as he had before so he had again pressed all the grief down where it needed to go so that he could live. But the other would not — could not stand it. 

“I ought to — ”

“Dumbledore asked — Remus, he asked for a word.” She said it like she was telling him biopsy results. She was looking at her folded hands in her lap. Like Sirius — he wondered if it was a self-loathing Black thing — she bit her nails past the quick; they were bloody and degraded about the beds. Scraps of old black polish toward the ragged cuticle. On her right ring finger she wore a simple gold band he wondered if Fleur had given her. “It sounded ser— it sounded, um, important.” 

“It usually is.” 

His knees cracked when he stood and one of them locked on him on his way to the fireplace. “Remus,” Tonks said carefully. Every fucking word out of her mouth sounded like she was eulogizing him. 

“What is it.” 

“You do know — you’ll Floo me and Fleur if you need — if you need anything, won’t you?” 

Every single one of them had said this one way or another since the day. Kingsley had said it. Even Harry had said it. 

“I do know,” he said. She had stood and put her coat on and brushed biscuit crumbs from her skirt. “You don’t — I don’t think it’s confidential, what he’ll have to say.” In fact he thought he already knew what it was. 

Tonks shook her head. Her face twisted like it did sometimes when she was about to change it, though she was just crying. It pained her to face him and the house, Remus understood; she was not the only one. Sometimes he felt like a living relic. “I have to — I told Fleur I would get us a curry.” 

“Right,” he said, “yes.” 

He let her show herself to the door. He understood it was rude but could hardly be bothered. He took a handful of the Floo powder and shoved his head in. “Fucking — Hogwarts headmaster’s office.” 

\--

He was obliged to return to Somerset and the moors of his youth in search of a numbers station Dumbledore claimed to have pinpointed near Minehead. “They are popularly considered by Muggles to have had to do with intelligence expeditions during the first world war,” the old man explained, as though Remus did not know this. “They are also among the first existing examples of broadcast spellry which I know interests you.” 

Remus had done a project on radio magic in fourth year and since then had not thought about it much. 

“We could use the frequency,” said Dumbledore. “I am sure you understand what I am envisioning.” 

“Yes,” said Remus, “the waves bouncing off the curve of the earth.” 

“Indeed. You could be anywhere in the world recording and broadcasting actual programming and it could not be pinpointed. Among the most secure methods of mass communication as yet known to us with our not inconsiderable knowledge. We could use a leg up on that as after all they have — ” He tapped his forearm where the Dark Mark would appear on those foresworn. 

“How’d you find this station then.” 

Dumbledore’s eyes twinkled. “Several informants.”

“Right,” said Remus, “well I suppose after the full moon.” 

“On the contrary my dear boy you are expected in Minehead’s Bar on the Quay no later than tomorrow evening.” 

In his mouth held ever under his tongue he had the words: You killed him. You strung the noose up and he stepped into it and left you holding perhaps a round dozen more nooses and as such please be wary of addressing sentences to me starting with _on the contrary my dear boy_. Himself he had written the letter in advance of the June 30 blue moon expecting thoroughly to be found in a bloody pulp in the basement at Grimmauld Place hopefully not by one of the kids: _Do you ever find it quite suspicious the greatest wizard in a century claimed not to have known James and Lily had switched Secret Keepers when he was ever in their most trusted confidence? He has always claimed to have known what needed to be done to defeat Voldemort but I have never heard a whisper of it and as such I warn you to please be very prudent about where you invest your trust._ It was addressed to Harry at his aunt and uncle’s in Surrey and he had left it on the bedside where he had been hardly sleeping by then twenty-four days. 

Instead of it all he said to Dumbledore, “If you just wanted to get me out of the house you could have said it right out.” 

“Do not sell yourself short, Remus; the hour is too dire for any of us to deny our abilities.” 

He pulled himself bodily out of the fire and pressed a hand over his mouth and screamed. 

\--

Of course it was then as such that Remus Floo’d the following evening to the Bar on the Quay with his second and third doses of Wolfsbane in two separate Nalgenes in his backpack. It was the same pack he had carried around the world with him in what he had begun to consider his first trial and it still had his hasty youthful undetectable extension charms on it and he had jammed his tent in there and a few scrying elements and a book (Frazer’s _The Golden Bough_ ) and a pack of cigarettes. Any impression he had had that it might be good for him to get out of London as though he were some Victorian lady seized with the vapors was nearly immediately quashed when he walked out of the fireplace into a still and largely silent scene dressed by seafaring types at once burly and ghostly, nursing pitch-black beers. The room smelled like stale smoke and his appearance went unnoticed by nearly all in the premises but for someone’s pit bull who set to growling in the corner. It was close enough to the full moon — it was waxing so heavy in the thick summer dusk that he could feel his bones rubbing together at the knees — to set him on edge. 

“Shot of Fernet,” he said to the bartender. He rifled in his backpack for his cigarettes and one of the Nalgenes. Down the bar someone of indeterminate gender was drinking what looked like blood out of a mason jar so he figured this was appropriate company. 

The bartender brought his Fernet and an ashtray. “What’s in that,” he asked, indicating the Nalgene bottle. 

“You don’t want to know.” 

“Looks like vomit.”

“Tastes as such. Have you matches?” 

The bartender produced them from his apron’s voluminous pockets. “You must be Lupin.” 

“Yes.” 

“Dumbledore said, chain-smoking werewolf from Castle Cary.” Also from the pockets he produced a small canvas bag containing implements which clinked, which he set on the bar and pushed toward Remus with a big, hairy hand. “If you’re on Wolfsbane you can change in the basement tomorrow night if you don’t mind sharing.” 

“Sharing with who?” 

The bartender chinned over Remus’s shoulder back toward the corner where he knew the man with the dog was sitting. “Ol’ Bart. He ain’t so bad but Buster on the other hand…” 

“Right,” Remus said, “thanks.” 

He drank the potion and chased it with the Fernet and had two cigarettes and then he went out into the evening and the salt breeze. The moon was pulling at his strings like a harpist. It reminded him last he had been to Minehead it had been in his last month of whole humanness. After that his parents had seen fit to stay somewhere they found easily defensible. They feared that if fellow holidaymakers saw Remus’s wounds and scars he would be confiscated by Muggle Child Protective Services and resultingly end up eviscerating some well-meaning Manchester foster family upon the next full moon. It had been July and they had stayed at a fancy resort and Remus’s father had gotten very sunburnt and they had eaten ice cream flavored exotically and his mother had started drinking at noon and had laughed overmuch and it had been thirty-one years ago almost to the day. 

He walked up past the harbor and out of the streetlights and watched in the West while the last shreds of sun faded. On the edge of the parkland he made camp and cast a soft light with his wand and opened the package Dumbledore had left for him at the Bar on the Quay. A map on soft vellum paper — a tiny handheld radio Remus felt the telltale spells in. A sneakoscope of rather high quality which Remus could tell because holding it in his own hand made it seem mildly nervous. He was surprised it hadn’t been throwing fits in the bar. Still he tucked it in his pocket. 

\--

He dreamed again about Dinas Bran. This time he was in an upstairs room seated by an illustrious and kingly bed in which Sirius was propped up weakly on an ecstasy of overstuffed pillows surveying out the wide distant windows the spread of lands burnt-blackened unto the horizon. Cutting through was the river a searing silver in the sun’s unfocused white eye blurred apart by the sheer clouds. Remus held the brittle white hand in two of his own tracing the tattooed sigil lines with his fingers. “Alright?” he asked. 

“Yes,” said Sirius. He sat a little straighter. He looked the way he had in the Shrieking Shack only two years previous so hollow was his chest inside his shirt like the wrong kind of wind would blow him over. “Yes,” he said again, “Moony, just fine.” 

“You’re bleeding.” 

He wasn’t sure where the blood came from or when it had gotten there but it spread across Sirius’s lap and the pale cotton bedding in grotesque menstrual flood as though Remus were not the one between the two of them with the bloody monthly curse. Sirius gingerly lifted his knees as if to hide the spreading stain of it. “Yes,” he said, tiredly. “It’s alright.” 

“There must be something — can't I help?” 

“No,” said Sirius. “The lance — ”

“What lance?” 

“You have to — ”

He took his hand from Remus’s and moved the sheets aside. The puncture wound through his thigh frothed with his heartbeat. 

“Find the lance.” It was like the wound said it. 

“There was no lance, Sirius, she — ” 

Remus pressed his hand against the wound. Sirius’s skin was cold. Even this — there hadn’t been a body. He had longed for this. The blood pressed between his fingers dark as a dying star. 

“She and the — the veil — ” 

“Before that. Remus.” Sirius’s hand pressed over his. The other wrapped the back of his neck. The eyes were deep and dark and fever-bright and their silver was a blunt and cold gunmetal grey. “What do you think is the thing that he wants most desperately?” 

He woke in the wood hearing the sea rumble against the high chalk bluff with his heart slamming like a door; it was dawn. He felt like a tub of ice water had been thrown over his head but rather it was the last threads of night breeze cooling his sweat. He allowed himself a few minutes to recover before he packed his things. His every muscle was in knots aching with the pull of the moon and the potion’s chemic trickery and his head hurt with the dream such that he thought he could smell blood. When he could finally get to his feet he consulted the map and put on the pocket radio and followed the static to the Southwest toward the highway. He had never given much credence to his own dreams let alone his full moon dreams which customarily were even bloodier; he chalked them up to the non-self and tried not to think much of them. This one, however, could not be so easily ascribed to the animal. 

He walked all morning in the heavy and ever-rainless grey humidity casting occasional spells to keep himself cool (real high-quality extra-strength ones taught to him by Parminder Bhat, native of Mumbai, in second year Charms). When he reached the highway he walked along it an hour or so keeping to the shade and the cars passed so uncomfortably close he was relieved to wander back into the tangled pathless woods. He passed on the fringes of rich estates and walked through abandoned ones — sometimes feeling threads of magic there — with an archaeologist’s morbid curiosity. 

Despite a half-hour adjournment to inspect a haunted barn (in the end the spirits there, four women, were too shy to show their faces) he found the region marked on Dumbledore’s map around noon. Shortly thereafter he started hearing sounds in the static when he turned on the pocket radio. From the cadence it was a human voice, though he couldn’t yet tell the words or even the language. Emboldened, he tried a few compass spells and broke out his scrying things and within a few hours he had found a clever sort of sanctum nestled into the wild rearing root network of an ancient and very pale weeping sycamore. He left his backpack in the shade, had a drink of water and a piece of jerky and a bit of chocolate, set about checking on the wards, the protections and the visitations and the spell history, what filaments of earth memory he could summon with the minimal terramancy he had learned sixth year from his Ancient Runes professor in the tower room after hours, until said professor had put a wizened pale hand way up high inside Remus’s thigh. 

By dusk he thought he could have tried more tests just to assure he wasn’t wandering directly into some Death Eater encampment but the non-self was tugging at him like a noose and he ached and his magic was blurring out like an old cassette. Inside it was stale and musty and the concrete chipping away in a corner slipping loam and beyond it sky. Remus dragged his backpack down with him and shut the door and warded it behind him and went to the controls. A set of headphones sat in a centimeter of dust and curiously he put them on, found their volume knob, and twisted it slowly — 

“OUR LORD PELLAM FORMERLY OF LISTENEISE DOTH CORDIALLY INVITE YOU TO JOIN HIM IN CELEBRATION OF THE DANCE OF THE LIFTING OF THE SEVEN VEILS — ”

It was a joke, Remus told himself. It was a code — it was a trippy encrypted holdover from the Cold War and that was all. 

“ — FOR THE LANCING OF THE BLOOD FROM HIS SEVENTH GRAIL — ” 

The voice — a woman’s — was familiar but infinitesimally distorted. He reached for the tone knob but with his hands so badly shaking he slipped instead the signal to receive instead of playback. When the voice had gone the sound in the static was like falling bells. Still as a windless room. That he could hear any sound at all besides a vivid fuzz meant this other transceiver had to be within a day’s walk. He took his wand from his pocket in order to tune the dial just a fraction and when he did he heard the bass kick in; the song that played was Pavement’s “Grounded.” 

It could not be a coincidence. Simply it was not possible. As when he had been young and heard “I Wanna Be Your Dog” in a club in Budapest and had gone outside to vomit in the alleyway. 

They had listened to _Wowee Zowee_ together in the parlor room at Grimmauld Place the evening of the day it came out when Remus brought it back from the record store with a bottle of passable wine and Sirius had made some fairly edible semblance of a meal with leftovers Molly had abandoned in the fridge. He cherished the moments he could pretend they were a real couple doing something nice together like making a whole theatrical deal of listening to a record by a bunch of American stoners as though Sirius was not trapped in the house and drinking more than he perhaps should and as though Remus had not been recently mauled by unfortunately aligned werewolves and would not be mauled again. _Wowee Zowee_ was a funny record because it contained Pavement’s most sincere songs to date and also their most irreverent and ridiculous bullshit and it was all arranged as though they had thrown the tracks on the studio floor and shuffled them up like a deck of cards and then cut them to vinyl as such for shits and giggles. “Grounded” was one of the former sandwiched between two of the latter and they had listened to it in pure breathless silence for the way everything waterfalled artfully into itself — waltzing arpeggiating steps up and down. It had always existed and they just had not heard it before. He was sitting at the floor at Sirius’s feet and in the sweet vivid all-saying all-seeing silence between them he wrapped a palm around Sirius’s cold bony ankle and felt him thrill to the touch. 

He dropped the headphones and they clattered on the floor and from his backpack he drew the Nalgene of Wolfsbane which he uncapped and emptied out into a spreading stinking puddle on the cold concrete. 

It was bitter dusk in the slim slant light through the hole in the ceiling. According to his moonwatch perhaps he had fifteen minutes. His heart was kicking like a horse and under his skin all his bones were sharpening and so help him he was thinking, finally. The animal knew what he had done and he could feel its rabid frothing joy. _At last._ But for one breathless exhilarating night when Remus had started that fragile glass ball of Dumbledore’s rolling ever toward uncertain completion he had starved the wolf now since late in 1991. 

Carefully he undressed and folded his clothes neatly and lay them on the sawhorse table with the radio equipment. The guitar in the headphones like a mellifluous low bell sounded like the veil. Not that it had made a sound in that room but later when he thought about it he thought he had always heard that sound. The falling — God, the eternity of the fall. The dry ice fragmenting, the endless dream. Somewhere there was still falling. Inside his very soul there was still falling. 

He ached. He tried to remember what this had been like the last time. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. The voice had started playing again from the headphones. THE DANCE OF THE LIFTING OF THE SEVEN VEILS FOR THE LANCING OF THE BLOOD FROM HIS SEVENTH GRAIL — 

Perhaps he had finally gotten to a point where the world itself was indecipherable. He felt it shoving forth first from his lungs — from his heart. _Mine now,_ it was saying. _Mine now mine now mine now mine now_. His blood flowed so hot at first it seemed to burn with cold. 

It seemed fitting he would not know the moment of death as Sirius had not. Only the transitory. Liquid to gas. Form to nothingness. When you had broken so many pieces off where did that leave the self? And what sustained it? He should have learned it from the first time but apparently contingency plans were not his strong suit. Half his life was with Sirius in whatever bleary bardo was past the veil. The rest of it was only this shell-self on its doomed grail quest… 

_What do you think is the thing that he wants most desperately?_

A Horcrux, he thought, at the very last. And then, _Harry_. 

It swept up wild and rabid into his mind then through the stem of it up from his spine which he felt bending as though wrung at both ends. The last of the self of him screamed out through his mouth as in some final purge and his hands bracing his body up against the floor were not hands. 

\--

Remus’s parents had died in their cottage on the moor outside of Castle Cary late in 1978 under what the MLE had later reluctantly termed “suspicious circumstances.” No attempts had yet been made against Remus’s life and in fact he was spending most of his time sleeping on Sirius’s couch or on James and Lily’s and applying to assorted jobs and graduate programs at their kitchen tables in the foggy afternoons whilst draining their respective supplies of Earl Grey. He was notified via a very official-looking Ministry owl and immediately Apparated to the cottage where a squad of Ministry police and mediwizards were bustling about like characters in a rural hospital drama. 

He was held back from entering by none other than Kingsley Shacklebolt, at the time a trainee in the intelligence department. “Lupin,” he said gravely, “I am dreadfully sorry for your loss but I can’t let you in there until they finish their sweep.” 

Inside and over Kingsley’s shoulder Remus saw three men were shoving at the cellar door. “It’s fortified to hell and back down here chaps!” 

“Let me — ” Remus tried. His foot was on the threshold (his boots were untied) but Kingsley’s bulk kept him back. “I can explain it all.” 

“They pulled your file already from the werewolf registry,” Kingsley said. “I can’t say I wasn’t a little surprised.” 

“My dad’s a curse researcher,” Remus told him, “he has enemies.” 

“And your mum?” 

“She’s Muggleborn hence I’m sure you can — ” 

Kingsley shifted them both bodily from the door allowing a squadron of MLE troopers in yellow protective suits to carry a great deal of his father’s research (mostly, disturbingly, mutated rats bustling in neatly maintained cages, watching these interlopers confusedly) out from the study into waiting vans. “Where are they,” Remus asked. 

“The bodies? Already been taken to the regional morgue. I can take you in the car and we can do an ID.” 

“Can they tell what — ”

“The spell? Not initially. You’ll see.” 

Kingsley took him to the morgue in Lydford-On-Fosse and unzipped the bags containing his parents who looked very calm and still as if sleeping but for their lips were blue. Whoever had done it had caught them while they were at their afternoon tea. Some had spilled on his mother’s collar. Kingsley escorted them out back where Remus threw up behind a dumpster, then they went to the pub. It was not yet noon and Kingsley apparently felt guilty enough especially after two Guinnesses of his own to continue buying Remus shots on the Ministry dime so by the time he was deposited in the Floo to return to Sirius’s place in London it was past midnight and he could hardly stand up straight. 

Sirius was smoking a blunt on the couch listening to Television which seemed in those days his favorite activity. “Someone’s head’s about to be in the toilet all day tomorrow,” he said, smiling. 

“My parents died,” Remus told him, “yesterday afternoon.” 

Sirius who had wished death upon his own parents approximately nine thousand times in Remus’s memory looked like he was calculating in the deep recesses of his stoned brain just how to react to this news. Remus sat heavily in one of the chairs at the kitchen table. He had left his application to the magical archaeology program at Edinburgh laid out all over the table in his haste and Sirius had carefully stacked the papers and laid them to the side with a tiny sweet to weigh them down. It was something like his mom would have done summer holidays while he was in school. A thoughtful, minimalist acknowledgement — a token to indicate that it all wasn’t useless. 

He had cried in front of Sirius perhaps thrice in his life before and once was from anger and another was from pain and he had vowed after the third juncture never to do it again no matter the reason. So he pressed his hand over his nose and mouth and didn’t look at Sirius on the couch in the other room when he said muffledly, “You are going to have to come with me to the Shack — ”

“Three days,” said Sirius, looking at his wrist. He had this incredible moonwatch that had probably once belonged to a Hebridean werewolf god-king in the days when there were such things; Remus suspected he had purchased it in Knockturn Alley or otherwise he had found it somewhere in Grimmauld Place. 

“In three days. Otherwise — ”

“Anything,” said Sirius. His reddened eyes were big with shock. “Anything, everything, anything you need.” 

“I just want — I need to lie down.” 

Sirius made him take a hit of the blunt and then walked him into the bedroom and turned down the red velvet blankets and pressed him down by the shoulder. In the other room he could hear the tea-leaf dregs of “Marquee Moon.” In three days’ time they would Apparate together to the Shrieking Shack. Even by then Remus’s hangover had not fully dissipated or it was some physical manifestation of his grief and together they sat on the floor and he felt it seep up through his spine like water — 

What made you human, he had long ago realized, was the ability to not fully feel. Unique to the species was the capacity to compartmentalize. In this liminal self his very blood was grief and it was black and cold. 

His parents had always sat with him in the basement until their lives were in danger. The last thing he would hear was the clattering rainfall sound of them running up the stairs. He had not dared to tell them Sirius and James and Peter had become Animagi because he feared they would try it for themselves. They did not sleep. His mother told him later they spent full moon nights in the kitchen sharing at least three bottles of wine and a full pack of cigarettes listening to the wolf at the door. At the barest hint of light in the sky they would go downstairs together, wands drawn, with a medical kit they kept in a milk crate whose glass bits rattling would be the first sound Remus would hear upon waking up. 

“Alright,” said Sirius, “it’s alright.” They were sitting very close on the floor. It would be another year until the Cornwall coast and the night at the Six Arms and the rest of it. Until then Sirius was just his very dearest friend about whom he had had (by conservative estimate) under ten sex dreams. Sirius who was holding the back of his neck and his thumb was up behind Remus’s ear and he could feel the sharp nail and the ragged calluses and yet it was when Sirius pressed their foreheads together that he shattered. He wept until it blurred out. Somewhere far away he heard it turn to screaming. 

When he woke someone was tucking his hair behind his ear. The light was coming in yellow-grey through the high window and he was curled up on the wood floor which was bitter cold and he could taste his nose and mouth full of blood. Weakly he coughed and spat something thick. Someone’s hand wrapped his forehead — kissed under his ear. Pressed his heartbeat. “Moony,” said the someone. “There you are, Moony, love.” 

Here I am. Here. He cracked an eye; through the blood he saw the room was not the same as he remembered. 

He hurt too much to be dead. That much apparent. The presence he could not see — like the shy ghosts — pressing the knots from his shoulders. He lay in the wreckage of the sawhorse table with certain of his limbs wrapped mummylike in oil-black cassette tape. The morning breeze whistled a little through the chink high in the wall. 

_God damn it._

It took him ten minutes to sit. He wasn’t alone in the room but couldn’t say what was with him there. None of his bones were visible through his skin which seemed a minor victory. Both his shins were scraped raw to the knee and his lips were smashed and two teeth chipped. The wolf had pulled all the radio machinery apart the way it would have done to something it had killed. Indeed it felt very much like he had disassembled a full mixing board and transmitter with his teeth. His gums were raw, his jaw hurt. He spat another mouthful of blood and then a third and finally he pulled from inside his cheek a bit of shrapnel. 

He bent both knees and circled his ankles. Wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck. Crawled to his backpack for his wand and his bottle of water, cleaned his face and his wounds, fixed his teeth, attempted the healing he could. Tried thrice to get to his feet and on the third assay managed to stand long enough to dress before his head started spinning and he was obliged to sit again tenderly against the wall. Despite his best attentions blood started pressing up straightaway at the shins of the jeans. 

In the pocket was the handheld radio of Dumbledore’s, which he switched on. His nocturnal attentions had killed the local signal regarding the seven veils and the seventh grail and yet the music signal from the other station seemed even stronger than it had the evening previous. It was playing Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” 

“Get up,” he said aloud to himself. He said it again every couple minutes until he could manage it. With magic he lightened his backpack as much as it would lighten given the elemental laws of transfiguration and he ate a bit of chocolate for a little energy and he went out weak and stumbling and sun-blinded like something just born into the pale morning light. Outside he could bring the radio signal into almost faultless reception with just a little magic. He tried a few compass spells again and he listened into the soft July breeze and as he walked West he mentally composed a letter to Dumbledore never to be sent, to keep his mind from the pain: 

_Death Eaters had seized your frequency and as per the messaging they left I now know that Voldemort has at least one Horcrux and that one of them is Harry. But perhaps you have known this now for fifteen years. Now I understand for certain that our lives were collateral. I understand it is likely that they have been since we were born. I wonder if you sent Fenrir Greyback after my father. I wonder if this was all orchestrated since — or if it has always been. I wonder what Listeneise you think you will bring back after this. I wonder if Harry knows yet that he will have to die._

_They spoke about the lifting of the seven veils and I wonder where the other six of them are and I know that you know what is back there. I wonder how you could have taken from me the last thing I had that was mine. I am not sure why I am still alive. I would say it is your error but I am not sure if you have ever made one. So it must be for a reason. So I am looking — as I always have — for that reason. More for the bloody lance than for the grail, if you will._

The wood opened up onto the wide spreading moor emerald green under the wild sky intercut and sectioned with overgrown mossy stone walls demarcating land rights older than time. On the handheld radio in Remus’s pocket now was Television’s “Marquee Moon” clear and vibrant as crystal and yearning. There was blood in his shoes. _I remember how the darkness doubled…_

In the end perhaps he had been fated all along to do this alone and it was fitting that he would end it as such here in the place where years ago he had been consigned to live in whatever liminal sliver could be cut out of the human world for him. After all he had survived too long in the waste land to know anything else. Its richness would starve him and the sight of it would blind him. The sound of it would deafen him. The feeling and the touch of it — he would lie in bed the rest of his days tortured by its completeness when he himself long ago had been scraped hollow. 

He set off into the fields upon the final foray of thirty years’ uncertain and destinationless pilgrimage. As ever he was thinking someone else’s words: “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” 

\--

When  
you wake up  
from death,  
you will find yourself  
in my arms,  
and   
I will be   
kissing you,  
and  
I   
will be crying

— Richard Brautigan, “If I Should Die Before You Do”

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this whole series just to have harry potter say his favorite gbv song is my valuable hunting knife.   
> this story is named after one of the best and most beautiful songs i know -- [grounded](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Nsy4h8rD4) by pavement. listeneise is the name of the [pre-wasteland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listeneise) in several arthurian works. dinas bran is one of the british castles some scholars think the grail castle corbenic is based on. thus -- remus's final line is from eliot's "the waste land."   
> massive thanks as always to [imochan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan), who read bits and pieces and suggested more bits and pieces, and [montparnasse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse), for inspiring sirius's tattoos and encouraging a lot of sad pavement listening


End file.
